


Enough

by Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But Only People Who Deserve It, Canon Universe, Dark Rey (Star Wars), Emperor Kylo Ren, Empress Rey, F/M, Feminist Themes, Fix-It of Sorts, If Star Wars Had Included A Single Woman on the Writing Team, Loss of Virginity, Many People Are Force Choked, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rey deserved better, Smut, Some Humor, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, Throne Sex, Virgin Kylo Ren, Virgin Rey (Star Wars), You'll be the one to turn, but I do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-02-19 03:15:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22304368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard/pseuds/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard
Summary: Rey has had enough.There's the Light Side and the Dark Side, but who's on Rey's side?***Canonverse AU where Rey decides to stop fighting what she hates and start saving what she loves.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 485
Kudos: 1718





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ever-so-reylo (Ever_So_Reylo)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ever_So_Reylo/gifts).



> Ali, I tried to write the anal epilogue to the List for your birthday and it just didn't work.
> 
> But then I thought, what if Rey and Ben were still really dumb, and still really virgins, but also alive and in space? 
> 
> Happy belated birthday.

The first time the thought skitters across her mind is at Poe’s promotion ceremony. Leia has her arm around Poe’s shoulders as she pins the insignia of rank back onto his flight suit. The mood is jovial; the Resistance has little enough to celebrate, these days, and hidden flasks and bottles are unveiled and passed so that they can toast Poe. 

It strikes Rey, as she watches Rose smile and clap for Commander Dameron, that Poe has not actually accomplished very much worth celebrating. The Resistance has not amassed more ships, more personnel, or more bases. They have intelligence, yes, but without the ability to project force anywhere in the galaxy, the Resistance has let the First Order have unfettered control for the past year. 

Rey has read the Jedi texts forwards and backwards and once even side-to-side, hoping that they would divulge some secret capable of propelling their few-hundred-strong gang of rebels to a force capable of defeating the First Order. The Jedi texts do not have much on the subject of building. Instead, they write of controlling. The self, the Order, the Sith. 

The Jedi already knew power. They sought to maintain it.

 _A Jedi must learn to follow before he learns to lead,_ the texts instruct. And Rey has tried so hard. She’s lost so many people she would have followed. All she has left is Leia, and she spends her days learning from her. Not that Leia teaches her about power; Leia teaches her to block blaster bolts, strike with a lightsaber, and also, daily, how best to pick up heavy things and put them down again. With her mind, naturally. Leia does not teach Rey to lead. 

It occurs to Rey that Poe very rarely listens to Leia, even though she is ruffling his hair with obvious affection. 

“We should have done this for you,” Rey blurts to Rose, before she can think about the wisdom of speaking it out loud. Rose is a commander too, although she wears no badge. They did not have a celebration for her promotion, rather, her promotion had seemed almost an afterthought, an acknowledgement of the work Rose was doing in keeping all of their ships in the air. 

“Oh, I don’t need a party or anything,” Rose says, and she doesn’t let her smile slip. The only sign that Rey’s words have affected her at all is a flush across her nose and cheeks. “It’s enough to know that I’m doing good work.” 

It’s the first time that Rey wonders whether that’s enough. 

* * *

Rey wonders again the night before they leave for Pasaana. The Resistance has varied takes on the veracity of the rumors that the Emperor has returned and that a new fleet rises on Exegol, but they generally agree that they must find and oppose him. It is taken for granted that this is Rey’s calling; she is their Jedi, she must fight the First Order’s Sith. 

Luke is dead. Leia never completed her training. It’s up to Rey.

“Did you teach Ben? Before he went to train with Luke?” Rey asks Leia, before she leaves. 

“Oh,” says Leia, looking wistful. “No. I didn’t. I had put that all aside. I chose a different path--my work with the New Republic, my family…” Her voice trails off as she realizes what she is saying. “The path of a Jedi is-” 

She can’t finish her sentence. Luke spent the last years of his life a miserable hermit, they are both thinking. That’s the path they’re sending Rey down, plus or minus a few padawans, if she survives. 

“Well,” Leia says, subdued. “After the war is over. You can think about it.” 

“After the war is over,” Rey agrees, only to end the conversation. Then pauses.

“Have you ever- I mean, since last year. Or earlier, really. Have you tried talking to Ben? Asking him if there’s another way?”

Leia looks surprised. “Of course not. Why would he even be open to that? He has embraced the Dark Side. Why would he give up his power?” 

That night, and the next night, rubbing the new scratch on her neck, Rey wonders.

* * *

She wonders when Ben begs her to join him on the Dark Side. She wonders when she watches Aki Aki children play. She wonders when Kijimi explodes. She wonders when Poe and Finn do not mourn Chewie, or C-3PO, or Zorii, or the tiny droidsmith. Their fight is everything to members of the Resistance, and yet the war appears to mean nothing to them. What would winning even mean? What would Rey have, if she won? A lightsaber and a dead cause?

She wonders, numbly, as Ben’s revelations about her family sink in. Rey is a scion of the Dark, as Ben is. Her entire life has been shaped by the misdeeds of dead men long before her birth. 

Can it be enough? To fight and hope to win? To continue this endless war?

From the tiny quarters allotted her on the Falcon, she contacts Ajan Kloss. 

“Did you know?” she demands of Leia. 

Leia does her the courtesy of not dissembling. “Yes,” she readily acknowledges. “I didn’t tell you, because it didn’t matter. You’re still--”

Rey interrupts her for the first time. “Still a Palpatine! And how can you say it doesn’t matter? You lost your Senate seat when people found out you were Vader’s daughter. You sent your own son away because you were afraid of Sith lurking in your bloodline! How can you say it doesn’t matter?” Rey’s hands are clenched in fists as she glares down at the small, flickering blue image of Leia on the comms. 

“Rey. You have chosen the path of the Jedi,” Leia explains. “You chose-”

Rey hangs up the comms. She doesn’t feel like she’s ever chosen anything at all. 

* * *

By the time they reach Kef Bir, Rey has done some thinking. Poe, Finn, and Chewie are in high spirits; they don’t know about her heritage, and from their perspective, they’ve just struck an unexpected blow against the First Order. They aren’t feeling the loss of Kijimi, only the pleasure of watching Kylo’s face in the rear view window as they jumped to hyperspeed. A daring rescue is one of their favorite things. They’ll reckon with their losses after their victory.

And they still think only of victory after meeting Jannah’s band of former Stormtroopers. Finn is thrilled to meet others like him. Poe is glad to make additional allies. Rey is horrified, thinking only of how many others like Jannah there must be, hidden under helmets in the First Order. How many like Jannah died when they blew Starkiller? 

How many people are there trapped in this war, like Rey and Ben are trapped, fighting a war their grandparents started? 

Rey stares across the water at the wreckage of the Death Star. 

“We’ll go tomorrow,” Jannah is saying. 

“Right,” Rey agrees, excusing herself so that the rest of them can begin to set up camp. She’ll cross the water to the wreckage tomorrow. To find the Wayfinder, so that she can...what? Kill the Emperor again? So that they can get back to their regularly scheduled business of fighting with the First Order? Three generations later, and what has changed? Alderaan, Hosnian Prime, and Kijimi no longer hang in the sky, but the Galaxy has not changed. The Jedi still fight Sith. The Dark and Light gather allies and throw them at each other. Away from the space battles, people traffick in children and kill for money. 

Rey will never be able to give it enough. And it will take all she has.

Rey tosses the dagger that killed her parents on the ground. 

“It’s time to let old things die,” she says, squinting up at the sky as the rain begins to pour in earnest. Her future doesn’t lie in the wreckage of the Death Star. It lies in steps that no one has yet trodden. Someone else, across the stars. 

It’s nice and dry inside the Millenium Falcon. Rey feels better once she strips off her wet clothes and changes into a worn, sand-colored tunic and trousers she finds in a drawer off the galley. White is so impractical. It spots and stains and goes see-through in the rain. She is never going to wear it again. Green, she thinks. She’ll buy a dress made of soft green fabric, and wear it even if she can’t clip a saber to the belt. 

She combs out her hair and puts on slippers. She makes a cup of caf. Then she begins running through the pre-flight checklist. Truth be told, the Falcon nearly flies itself. It’s easy enough for one person to launch. And Rey is a hell of a pilot. 

She doesn’t check the rear-view camera, but she can imagine the faces of the people she leaves behind when she hits the thrusters and escapes the binds of gravity. 

* * *

For all he’s hounded her steps for the past year, it takes Ben a surprising amount of time to find her after she leaves Kef Bir. Even then, it’s not a fleet of star destroyers or a TIE with its weapons systems engaged; it is the Force-projected Supreme Leader alone, in the galley of the Falcon. He puts her in mind of a wet Loth-cat--he’s as angry as one, with his hair plastered to his skull and his teeth bared in a snarl.

“ _You weren’t there_ ,” he hisses at her. “What’s your game? I have both Wayfinders now. I’m the only one who knows how to get to Exegol. How do you possibly think you can win?” She can tell he’s been in a rage for a while now, working himself up. His chest heaves with it. She wonders how many things he’s destroyed. 

Rey has her legs up on the dejarrik table. She uncrosses them, and Ben’s eyes track the movement. 

“Maybe winning isn’t everything,” she tells him. She gestures to the seat at the other side of the board.

His angry, furrowed brow relaxes only marginally, replaced with confusion. After a few blinking moments, he settles down and slides into the seat she indicated. She wonders if he recognizes where he is. His hand does not stray far from the hilt of his lightsaber. 

“So. Ben. Let’s talk about what you want,” she says.

He stares at her, jaw twitching as he tries to understand why she is finally asking him what he thinks. He’s more accustomed to just telling her.

“I want...the same thing I’ve always wanted,” he says. “I want you to join me. We would be powerful together. Strong enough to destroy the Emperor and anyone else who would oppose us.”

“But what does that mean?” Rey asks, leaning forward on her elbows. “Are you offering an equal partnership? Where we make decisions together? Or is this more of a glorified bodyguard gig?” 

Ben tilts his head as though trying to see into her mind. Maybe he is; she wouldn’t mind it, this time. It might help explain what is careening around inside her skull. 

“...are we bargaining now?” he asks hesitantly. 

“I want to end the war,” Rey says. “The Jedi failed. The Sith were butchers. And I am so-” 

She stands up, and Ben watches her warily as she begins to pace. She struggles to put it into words.

“I am so sick of it! The First Order gains power, but what do you do with it? You’re the Supreme Leader, and you’ve spent the past year chasing me around the Galaxy and getting into sword fights. What’s the point of it all? Same rich warlords in charge down on the surface of every planet, the poor stay poor, the slaves stay slaves. Nobody is thinking of changing a thing, just winning.”

Ben processes that. He is dripping water onto the floor of the ship, and the drops are vibrating with the hyperdrive frequency before they vanish. “So you’re thinking of saying yes, if I let you have a say in the decisions?”

That _would_ be all he would take from what she said. 

“Equals,” she tells him, slapping a hand on the dejarrik table. “Neither of us makes a big decision without consulting the other. That means you _don’t_ blow up the Resistance base. There are barely two hundred of them. You can just let them be.”

He juts his lower lip out. “They’re a challenge to my power. I can’t look weak by letting them go.” 

“ _Our_ power. If you agree, I’ll announce the armistice on vidcom. I’ll say the war is over.”

Ben leans forward. “You’ll say to the entire Galaxy that you’ve decided to join the First Order.” 

“Yes,” Rey says. “If we have an agreement.” 

Ben is pale and twitchy. He has deep circles under his eyes. She wonders whether he’s had a good night’s sleep in years. She’s not making it easy on him, asking him to think this through on the spot. Deep thinking doesn’t come naturally to him. It’s not that he’s not intelligent, but the Skywalker way is to jump in first and think after the bodies of one’s enemies are already cooling in pieces on the floor.

“But how would this even work? We’re bound to disagree. You’re always disagreeing with me. What will we do when I want to do one thing, and you want something else?”

Rey avoids rolling her eyes. Ben’s taken very little operational control of the First Order, as far as Resistance intelligence has been able to discern. She doesn't expect him to have strong opinions about her exact methods of ruling the Galaxy. 

“Then we won’t do anything until we work it out. Or maybe we’ll fight about it. See who wins.”

Ben sucks in a deep breath and holds it. He’s excited by that mental image. The bastard is, as best Rey can tell through their bond, more than a little bit turned on by the thought of settling a policy dispute by swatting at her with a laser sword. Fine. That’s fine. It’s not like Rey assumed that she was taking on a restful domestic life in the First Order. 

His eyes flick around her face as he looks for signs of guile. He’ll find none; they have never lied to each other, and she doesn’t intend to start now. Things may not go as Ben thinks, but she’s offering him her honest cooperation and partnership. It may even be good for him. He comes to a decision and straightens, apparently satisfying himself of her reliability. 

“Did I change your mind?” he asks, slowing sticking his gloved hand out to her. 

Rey reaches for his hand only to grab his fingertips and loosen the glove. She pulls it off and tosses it to the floor, where it disappears. Then she spits in her own palm and offers it to him. It’s how bargains are sealed on Jakku. Water in your hand. Ben’s face does not so much as twitch with disgust, but she’s not sure if he recognizes the gesture. Either way, it doesn’t stop him from spitting into his own hand and slapping it against hers. His expression is nearly slack with relief. He wonders whether he ought to kiss her now so loudly that the words nearly hang in the air. Looking at her stern, relentless expression, he decides against it. 

“You didn’t change my mind. I did,” Rey tells him. 

* * *

They iron out a few logistics then and there; they will meet not on his flagship, but a smaller capitol ship in firmly settled Outer Rim territory. There, they will make further plans to address the threat of the Emperor and the other present obstacles to Ben’s dominance. Their dominance, he corrects himself, without prompting. 

His shoulders are as rigid as they’ve ever been as they discuss it, but there’s something almost giddy about him as he talks. He is eager to tell her the details of the ship, the names of the officers who will be there, the rulers of the planets in the system. She has to gently shoo him away so that she can plot her course, and she assumes that he will have to make preparations on his end so that she is not shot on sight. He’s reluctant to leave her. Words are pouring out of him as though they’ve been bottled under pressure. And maybe they have; who would he have talked with, since leaving Luke’s temple? Snoke, maybe? His Knights? He sneaks little glances at her as he turns to go as though he expects her to take it all back. 

After his form fades from her field of view, Rey records a message for Leia. 

It’s surprisingly easy to announce that after reflection, Rey has decided that the best place to direct change in the Galaxy is from atop the reigning military organization. She assures Leia that she will do her best to ensure the safety of all members of the Resistance. After some contemplation, Rey adds that she will extend that guaranty to Leia’s son. Leia hasn’t done much for Ben in twenty years, but it’s possible that note will be reassuring.

It’s harder to record a message for Finn. She stops and starts several times. Eventually, she settles for telling him that if he was a good person while he was inside the First Order, he should believe that she is too. She promises to have the Falcon dropped off for Chewie to retrieve and to correspond soon.

And that’s it. She feels that she ought to feel something else; since leaving Jakku, she has not veered from her support for the Resistance. Even before that, she was convinced of the righteousness of the cause. She thought the Resistance was the only hope of the galaxy. She believed that brave souls in orange would someday liberate places like Niima Outpost from the sweaty grip of men like Unkar Plutt. 

As she sets her course for Arkanis, Rey has the sudden thought that she hasn’t given up hope. She’s only vested it in herself. 

It’s a very comforting thought, and sleep finds her faster than she expects.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter and every other one in this fic brought to you by the exquisitely horny music of Perfume Genius.

The First Order fleet surrounds Arkanis, but makes no move to intersect the Falcon as it sweeps through the blockade. The cloud cover is high enough not to interfere with her trajectory. The landing strip outside the capitol is clearly marked. The descent is easy. 

What she sees out over the bow is more concerning. Nearly two full companies of stormtroopers, in parade formation. White helmets gleam in the light drizzle, while the dull metal of the AT-STs arrayed behind them are easier to miss. 

Rey hisses in disappointment when she sees Kylo’s black and blocky form surrounded by nearly a dozen charcoal-garbed officers standing at attention around him, their elbows poking out from behind their backs. Lovely. A lovely scene.

She knows the scenario he’s set up: she’ll lower the gangway, walk out alone. She’ll have to walk across the wet grass to him. He’ll receive her in the height of his power, and all these First Order soldiers and officers will be there to witness it. Well. That’s how he thinks this will go.

Rey touches down but does not turn off the engines. She has enough fuel to just sit comfortably for a while. It’s warm and dry in the Falcon. Ben will get tired of standing around in the rain before she gets tired of watching him. It’s entertaining stuff, seeing the First Order troops begin to fidget and shift their weight, staring at the junky old freighter. 

Ben’s made of sterner material. He learned meditation from both sides of the Force. It takes him nearly twenty minutes of looking at the immobile ship without a sign of Rey before he makes some order to the nearest officer and begins to walk towards her ship. At least he comes alone, and he doesn’t unholster his lightsaber. Rey obligingly hits the button to lower the gangway before he is forced to knock on the undercarriage for admittance. That’s meeting him halfway, she thinks to herself. 

She thinks he will shout at her when he comes aboard, and she’s prepared to shout back, but he doesn’t say a thing until he has climbed through the cargo deck and up to the cockpit. It’s more unsettling than being yelled at, especially when she turns to find him looking around the galley, fully robed and hooded, with his repaired helmet covering his face. He flicks a broken cabinet door that juts into the narrow corridor with one finger. 

They look at each other for another few seconds of silence, before he asks, more mildly than expected, “When are you planning to come out?”

Rey crosses her arms across her chest defensively, not budging from the captain’s seat. “When you’ve disassembled your little surrender ceremony down there.” 

“It’s not a surrender ceremony,” Ben says, still smoothly calm. 

“And what exactly does it look like, when I troop out there by myself with 200 guns all pointed at me?” she asks him, letting a little of her frustration out into her voice.

Ben makes a point of looking around the cockpit. “Did you bring anyone else with you?”

She doesn’t dignify that with a response. 

“They’re an honor guard,” he adds. 

“Their guns are pointed at my ship. Who’s the honor for?” 

“When I walk out of here with you, they’ll be pointed at me too,” he points out, and that’s a fair point. He did come meet her. Rey considers that. 

“You needed all these people just to meet with me?” she finally asks. “I’m that intimidating?” 

His head tilts, the light catching on the cracks in the metal. “Until yesterday, you were the most-wanted criminal fugitive in the Galaxy. You should be glad they’re getting a different view of you.”

Rey rolls her shoulders. She supposes there was always going to be a first moment when she walked into a crowd of First Order soldiers and had to trust them not to shoot her. 

It’s not her proudest moment. Part of her is still screaming internally that she ought to hit Ben over the head with something heavy, hit the ignition, and carry him off for intensive Lightsider reconditioning. Oh well. Paths not taken.

“Fine,” she says, resigned. “We can go.” She stands up and grabs her boots. She the dusts blue puff crumbs off her tunic. She straightens to find Ben staring, transfixed, at her bare calves. He’s seen them before, hasn’t he? 

“Wait,” Ben says, lifting a hand. “You can’t wear...that.”

Rey looks down at herself. Her clothes are old but not shabby. An anonymous, earth-colored tunic and trews. 

“What’s wrong?” she asks, intrigued that the man in black is offering her fashion advice. 

“Don’t you have…” here his hand sketches an approximate neckline over his own chest “...that white thing you were wearing.”

No. It’s dirty and packed away. And…“I’m not walking out of here in white robes like some kind of virgin sacrifice,” she says, pointing her chin at him. Ben makes a noise, mostly muffled by his helmet. 

“You can’t wear that,” he insists. 

“What’s wrong with this?” Rey asks. “I would have packed a _gown_ , but I’ve been at war for a year and I didn’t know there was going to be a stupid surrender ceremony.”

Ben growls. “Those are my shirt and pants. I last wore them when I was ten.”

Rey looks down at her outfit in surprise. It would explain the several inches of wrist and ankle it exposes. She sighs. 

“It’s all I have.”

Which is how Rey ends up wearing Ben’s cloak, quickly hemmed by a swipe of his lightsaber. If the assembled soldiers are surprised to see their Supreme Leader reemerge, denuded of cloak and accompanied by a woman bearing the same, they are well-trained enough to hide it. 

Rey rests her fingers on his arm as though he is leading her into a ballroom rather than a parade grounds. Ben takes small steps so that she isn’t stretching to match his longer legs, but then they’ve always moved well together, haven’t they? There’s a trooper with a holocamera trained on her, so Rey squares her shoulders and keeps her chin level. The Galaxy will get a good look at her. The Jedi Killer and the last Jedi, arm in arm. 

Nearly five hundred men and women watch them as they cross to the coterie of officers, and halt. 

“The last Jedi has joined the First Order,” Ben announces. Nobody moves. “The Jedi end today. There is only the First Order.” The officers and stormtroopers remain in their positions of attention. Ben hesitates. He wants them to cheer. He doesn’t know how to order them to cheer, though. This is the first time he has personally addressed his troops in any number. He thinks about it some more. “Salute her!”

As one, the stormtroopers spin their weapons. They fire a volley over their heads, and a flock of avians take wing, squawking in dismay. Ben jerks under her fingertips. She can sense he’s at a loss. 

Rey takes pity on him. “The war is over,” she announces. “We will have peace. For the entire Galaxy. Including each and every person here today.” Then she makes a point to look around, doing her best to make eye contact with the crowd of anonymized soldiers. How many of them have longed for the opportunity to escape? How many of them still long for the families they lost? It could have so easily been her. 

There’s no way to fix the past. It’s up to her to build a future.

* * *

The First Order was without a flagship from the time that Vice-Admiral Holdo performed her eponymous maneuver until the rise of the Final Order fleet, and without a capital since Finn and Chewie destroyed Starkiller. The _Mandator_ -class dreadnought Ben flies Rey and the officers to is one of nearly a dozen that he has utilized over the past year. But Rey supposes that a man who wears the same outfit every day and sleeps on the floor has no need of a home. 

Rey sits quietly in the co-pilot’s seat as Ben guides them into the hangar. She’s not surprised that he doesn’t trust anyone else at the controls. Has anyone in Ben’s life ever not betrayed him, given the chance? 

When they arrive, though, it occurs to him to ask her what she wants to do first. 

“Operational review,” she says, promptly. There will not be another Kijimi on her watch. Or Hosnian Prime. Or even a Crait. Ben nods his absent agreement. His mind is elsewhere. 

One of the officers behind them makes a noise of indignant protest.

Instantly, Ben wheels on him, pupils narrowing to pinpricks at the hint of a challenge. 

“Did you have something you wished to say, Admiral?” he hisses through his helmet. 

“Supreme Leader,” the man whines. “The Jedi woman is-” Rey senses that the officer had originally had a different word in mind than ‘woman.’ 

“You will address her as Supreme Leader,” Ben cuts him off. 

“Are you no longer the Supreme Leader?” a different, equally reckless officer asks. 

“I am the Supreme Leader. She is the Supreme Leader,” Ben says. 

“This is absurd! You can’t expect us to follow-” the first starts up again, only to find himself dangling by his neck, several feet above the ground. Ben was really more patient than Rey expected, but she supposes he has every right to be in a good mood today. 

“Can’t I?” Ben asks, his voice mockingly calm as the man gurgles and chokes. Ben isn’t crushing his windpipe, just letting him slowly dangle by his invisible grasp. 

Rey steps to Ben’s side and rests her hand, very lightly, on Ben’s arm where he has it extended. He fractionally relaxes his grip on the man’s neck. 

“I believe you’ll find there’s more daylight beneath your feet right now than between the Supreme Leader and myself,” she tells the purpling officer. When she sweeps her fingertips down Ben’s arm, he lets the man fall to the floor. 

“Are there any other objections to an operational review?” Ben asks, and the man croaks out a negative response. The other officers salute and disperse with a quickness that is perhaps greater than that called for by military decorum.

As though he had not nearly executed one of his own officers, Ben inquires whether she wants lunch. 

“What was that admiral’s name?” Rey asks instead of answering. Of course she wants lunch. She could always eat. He’ll figure that out soon. 

Ben shrugs as though it’s unimportant, although she can tell that he legitimately doesn’t know. 

“How can you not know the names of your top officers?” she asks him incredulously. “Which ones are loyal to you?”

“All of them,” Ben responds, even though the man had been on the verge of open mutiny. “They’re all loyal to the First Order.” 

“Then how many of them are waiting to stab you in the back at the first opportunity?” Rey asks instead, framing her question differently.

“Oh. Also all of them,” Ben says, finally taking off his helmet and tucking it under his arm. “Most of them are too afraid to try, but I have to make an example every few weeks.” 

Rey shakes her head. “Have you thought about staffing your war council with people who won’t kill you if given the chance?” 

Ben smiles down at her, the first time she’s ever seen the movement on his face. It’s just a small twitch of his lip, but it makes an intriguing mix of ridges and hollows appear around his mouth. 

“If you can find any, you’re welcome to promote them,” he tells her. “As of yet, there’s only you.”

* * *

Ben leads her to the ship’s command central, which is dominated by a large throne composed of slabs of polished permasteel. Rey has the sudden understanding that on each First Order star destroyer, there is a room like this, and a throne built so that Ben never has to sit in a normal-sized chair. 

Ben stalks immediately to the seat and sprawls out across it, placing the helmet to his left. Then he gestures to her with his right hand. His expression is bland, but she can feel satisfaction humming through their bond. As she approaches him, he spreads his legs wider. 

Ah. That’s why. He believes that his place is on the seat of power, and that her seat will be on _him._ There’s no way to squeeze in next to him with his knees blocking her way, so she is left with the choice of sitting on his lap or standing next to him, cementing either image in the minds of the top officers of the First Order. 

Well. If he insists. Rey steps between his legs, smiling gently down at Ben, then turns to face out at the crowd of stone-faced military commanders. She sits down. As hard as she can, with a vicious thrust of her hipbones towards the area where men are, in her experience, most vulnerable. 

Ben’s no different. He grunts and jerks sharply back, which has the happy and intended effect of clearing space next to him on the throne. So she slides over his thigh and scoots in at his right side. It turns out there’s enough room for the two of them. 

Ben is still blinking rapidly at the ceiling while he processes his unexpected defeat, so Rey runs a hand up to cup the back of his neck. When her thumb brushes the bottom of his hairline, his shoulders unclench. Rey winds her fingers into the soft, matted curls there, knowing she can yank his head back if he objects to the new seating arrangements. 

He doesn’t. As though eager to establish boundaries, he settles one large, gloved hand over her knee. That, at least, Rey decides she’ll allow, after a moment’s contemplation of the way his palm wraps around half the circumference of her thigh. It’s not completely comfortable, but it’s workable. 

She wonders what the assembled military officers think of the little domestic drama unfolding before them, then decides that she doesn’t care. Most of them will likely be choked to death by Ben or perhaps Rey at some time in the next few weeks, given their expressions of hostility. 

A general stands and gives an update of the First Order’s new mines in the Mid Rim. An admiral follows with an update on the ongoing space battles with the mines’ former owners. Rey settles in, ready to take extensive mental notes. 

A servitor droid comes around with a datapad for lunch orders. Rey scans the menu and can’t recognize most of the options, much less their planets of origin. So she shrugs and orders one of everything. She’ll figure out which ones she likes. When she passes it to Ben, he pauses, then moves to pass it back to the droid without placing his own order.

“Wait,” Rey says. It’s the first time she’s spoken since the presentation began, and he looks at her curiously. “Are you not hungry?”

“I thought I’d eat whatever you didn’t want,” he said, his lip curving in what Rey has come to recognize is concealed amusement. 

“Is there not enough food for everyone?” Rey asks, scanning the wardroom and counting heads. 

This time, Ben really does smile. “No, we have plenty of supplies.”

“Well, then the leftovers are mine too,” she tells him firmly. 

He freezes as though waiting to see if she’s joking. The other officers are watching them by now. Ben wordlessly ticks the counter up on the top option and turns back to the meeting. 

“Please proceed,” Rey tells the officer who had been speaking.

* * *

Several hours later, Rey feels confident that the First Order is not planning any imminent atrocities that require her personal intervention. Ongoing war crimes in slow motion across a very wide area, yes, but it’s her first day. 

Ben has barely blinked as he’s listened to it all. His mind has been somewhere else entirely, and Rey doesn’t think it’s on the ancient Sith sorcerer haunting them both. Rey has a running list of terms to look up once out of the grim assessment of the First Order officers: what is an “inflationary spiral?” What is a “depletion study?” The First Order has operations on worlds she’s never even heard of and is now responsible for. She’d feel better about it if she had the sense that Ben had any better qualifications than she did. But he does not: Ben knows a great deal about the First Order’s weapon systems, a moderate amount about its territorial expansion, and nothing at all about the details of its rule. 

_Leia, you should have taught us both,_ Rey thinks, not for the first time that day. 

She will learn. It can’t possibly be any harder work than stripping Star Destroyers in the Jakku desert. 

“Strategic reviews next week assuming any of you are still alive,” she announces, nodding at the one Ben choked. “Stormtrooper program, governor appointments, slave trade.” Most of them are thin-lipped and disapproving, but they’ll do as she says as long as Ben is next to her, glaring thoughts of painful murder at them. 

They file out, and Ben stretches slowly out next to her. He’s been giving out heat like a dying star the entire time, and Rey’s feeling more than a little damp under her arms and down the back of her neck. Also...places. 

So she leaps to her feet as soon as the officers have filed out. Ben sprawls out further, looking lazily up at her. 

“We need to discuss the Emperor,” she says. “They didn’t say anything about the Final Order.”

“The Final Order isn’t integrated yet. There’s only one ship. The Emperor was waiting for me to bring you back.”

“Just to kill me?” she asks, picking up a mislaid datapad and flicking through it. She supposes she has access to all of it now. What the Resistance would literally have died for. 

“Isn’t that what you do with family?” Ben asks, his mouth twisting. 

“Not funny,” Rey tells him, picking the datapad up and cradling it to her chest. 

“Never was.” 

Rey bends over, covers her face with her hands, then straightens, pulling her hair out of her face. This will be hard enough if she can’t count on Ben to fight back to back with her, not just one more time, but a hundred more times, if she judges the future ahead of them. 

“Are you serious about this empire, Ben? If you’re just playing dress up as Supreme Leader, waiting for me or someone else to kill you, just tell me now. I need to know I can rely on you. I want to fix this. _All_ of this.” 

Ben tilts his head to the side, eyes more serious now. 

“I want you to be happy here, Rey,” he says. “If you want to execute everyone in that room, or redesign the dreadnoughts, or give all the mines back to the Ewoks, you can. I promise.” 

She gives a short laugh. “Ben, my own grandfather wants to kill me or maybe eat me or possibly wear us both like skin suits. I don’t think happiness was ever in my destiny.”

Ben sits up and tucks one of his massive fists under his chin. He leans forward, finally alert and engaged.

“Maybe neither of us were destined to be happy. There’s no reason to expect we would be. The things we’ve done.” 

With that, he stands up, looking down at the broken, fault-lined helmet. Then he steps down from the throne. He lifts her hand, holding it delicately in his own. He entwines his fingers in hers.

His expression is searching when he asks her, “But won’t the whole rest of the Galaxy be furious, if we are?” 

* * *

They have a brief “executive session” to review the intelligence Ben has gathered on the Emperor and the Final Order. It’s grim stuff; the fleet around Exegol has enough planet-killers to destroy every inhabited world in the galaxy. It far exceeds the First Order’s power. As to the Emperor himself, Ben remains confident that he and Rey together have the strength to overcome him. Rey personally has her doubts; if Vader and Luke Skywalker were unable to defeat him at the height of their own powers, what guarantee was there that two far less experienced Force-wielders could do any better? 

Ben won’t hear of it. The Force is thick in his veins, telling him that the Galaxy is his for the taking with Rey at his side. 

“If you need anything. Ask a droid. Clothes. Food. Warships. You don’t have to ask me.” Ben tells her as they walk aft to the crew quarters.” 

“You don’t have to bribe me,” Rey tells him, amused. “I’m already here.” 

Her eyes feel starved for color after only one day spent in the First Order ranks. It’s unrelieved greyscale from the walls to the furnishings to the uniforms. It’s probably not healthy to stare at Ben for the only spots of life in view: the red of his lips, the warm brown of his eyes. She banishes that thought. It’s one more thing she owns now. If she wants to look at him, she can. He’s for her. 

Ben nods wordlessly, but his shoulder brushes frequently against her arm as they go. His boots make noise on the tile of the floor, the tempo somehow familiar despite the short time they have ever spent in the physical presence of the other. She’s been hearing the echoes of his days since the first time she saw his face on Starkiller, and the footsteps feel like reverberations when she hears them through both her own ears and his. 

“Which room is mine?” Rey asks, looking down the hallway they’ve turned into. All of the hatches are open, and the military-style bunks inside appear unused. This area of the ship has wide hallways and few personnel. Rey remembers the turnover rate in the senior officer pool. 

Ben hesitates, and Rey turns to look up at him. 

“I thought you would stay in my quarters,” he says.

Rey keeps her face carefully neutral. She’s honestly surprised he’s waited an entire day to make that ask, given his general level of self-control.

“I’ve been in your quarters,” she reminds him. “You don’t even have a bed in there.”

“It folds down from the wall,” he says, as though they are really discussing the major issue. 

“This one has a mattress and pillows,” Rey says, looking through the door. It would have comfortably slept three members of the Resistance, but appears to come standard for higher-ranking First Order officers. 

“I could have a bed brought in,” Ben bids. 

“Good night, Ben,” Rey says, taking a step back across the threshold. He doesn’t follow her, but he does grip each side of the hatch, suspending himself in the doorway. His face is rigid again.

“I thought- I suppose I thought-” his lips purse, and he pauses.

Rey sighs. She should have realized back in the throne room that she’d need to address this almost immediately. 

She has a direct line into Ben’s mind, and she knows that he’s spent the year since Crait wanting her. True, he thinks more of the sheer animal fact of _wanting_ her than the logistics of actually _having_ her, but that’s more a consequence of his own inexperience than his inclinations. He thinks in a vague way of pressing his body against hers and putting his mouth to her skin. But the _wanting--_ that’s the thought that burns him up from the inside out. 

Rey too, on the rare occasions when she allows herself real honesty. 

“I thought you would want to stay with me,” he finally says. “I thought- when you said you wanted to be partners, did you mean…? Are you really just here to stop the war?” His voice is tight, higher in pitch. He has taken it for granted that they are lit with the same kindling inside, and his backpedaling charms Rey more than his show of power earlier. So she cuts him off and takes the step back to him.

She splays her fingers and presses their barest tips to his abdomen. Her hand looks shockingly small and pale against the expanse of his chest. Even through the layers of his padded tunic, she can feel the reflexive push of his muscles against her touch. The warm rise/fall of his breathing. She matches it, centering them both. 

“I meant what I said,” she tells him, although his eyes are still creased with confusion. “I came here because I wanted to. And I don’t mean to deny myself anything I want. Even if that’s you.”

His eyes darken at that, and he ducks his head fractionally. He is thinking again about kissing her. Thinking of how the calls from the Dark and the Light calm when he touches her. 

But Rey turns her head to look past him. She has no real experience with intimacy. But she also has no desire to gain it in what would effectively be a menage-a-trois with Ben and the voices of all the Sith in his head. 

“Ben. We have to go to Exegol tomorrow. Shouldn’t we get some sleep?”

“I’ll sleep better with you. Won’t you too?” Ben’s beseeching expression would not have looked out of place on a Tooka pet. 

Rey looks back over her shoulder to the chamber behind her. There’s no furniture save the bed, and no features to soften the room besides the large transparisteel window looking out into the void of space. It’s cold and impersonal, like the rest of the ship. She can imagine staring at the hard edges of it, unable to sleep. 

Ben is supporting his weight by his hands, hanging from the frame of the hatch. Rey eyes the bulk of his chest, the lines of his muscular arms under his tunic. At least he’ll be warm. This is what you get, she reminded herself. She threw her lot in with the First Order, she gets the Supreme Leader in the bargain. This is all for her. 

“Fine. You can sleep in the big bed. _Just_ sleep.” At Ben’s feline expression of satisfaction, Rey jabs her finger against his sternum in emphasis. “I mean it. If you try to make anything happen tonight, I _will_ throw you through a bulkhead. I’m tired and we have a Sith Lord to defeat tomorrow.” 

Ben is all perfect innocence as he brushes past her into the bedroom. He removes his boots, then collects hers from where she’s tossed them in the center of the floor and lines them against the wall. He folds the cloak she discards and strips off only his padded overtunic, leaving it on the foot of the bed with his lightsaber. Then he merely stands at the end of the bed, watching her fluff out her hair over the pillow and wiggle into position. He stares at her as though he’s trying to memorize her. The way she looks, lying in bed. 

Ben waits until she’s settled on the far side of the bed to flip the sheets up and crawl in next to her. He’s as good as his word: he leaves a demilitarized strip of territory between them wide enough to stash two smaller rebels, were this the Millenium Falcon after the evacuation of Crait. 

“I’m not going to evict you for accidentally bumping me,” Rey grouses, absurdly offended by the gap. “Just don’t get handsy.” But he only huffs out a silent laugh and rolls over, his back facing her and the window. Rey squirms, somehow disappointed that that’s all there is to bedding down with Kylo Ren. She wasn’t sure what she expected: ancient Sith bedtime prayers? For him to strip to the altogether? His silent stillness is more disconcerting than either of those would have been. 

The First Order must lack adequate pillow technology, because even though the charcoal grey sheets are crisp and smooth, the little slab of foam that crowns the bed is as comfortable as the floor to rest her head on. Rey considers making Ben turn around to offer up his chest, but she observes that as he gets closer to sleep, he curls himself into a tight ball. Chin tucked to his chest. Elbows touching knees. It’s a defensive position. His face is pointed at the only entrance to the room. Rey sighs. Unraveling the tangled threads of Ben’s trauma will be a life’s work. 

She nestles closer to his broad, warm back. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, guys. I was overwhelmed by the beautiful responses I got to this. Literally overwhelmed...I couldn't answer any of them yet? I think that's my executive function, off to the wars?
> 
> But suffice to say that I DID read them several times a night (that's my anxiety, here to stay!) and have promised myself that I will respond!
> 
> In the interim, here's pining Ben and Rey getting what she deserves.
> 
> Kinkshame me on Twitter @YTCShepard


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am much more confident in my ability to write cockblocking than a fight scene, and everyone has been so sweet about this fic, so I hope I don't let you down!

When Rey wakes up, the change in the light disorients her. There’s no sunrise outside of orbit, and no reason to associate the light flooding through the transparisteel window with morning, but Rey’s mind is calm and clear, making her think that she has slept a full night’s rest. 

The white dwarf outside is Exegol’s sun, she knows somehow. It’s a dying star to light a dying world; a place where Rey must fight a dead god if she hopes for the Galaxy to live. But she doesn’t have to think about that just yet. 

She’s warm and comfortable; a combination nearly unique in her personal history, and she lets the soft sounds of Ben’s breathing wash over her for a few minutes before she rolls over to face him.

He has unfurled a bit from the night before, blooming into a shape that occupies more than half the bed. His head is tilted back on the pillow, and the light from the window gilds and softens the sharp lines of his profile. The Supreme Leader in repose, Rey thinks. 

Rey extends one tentative finger and traces the outline of his face, a centimeter above his skin. The thick brow, sharp nose. Full lips, incongruously soft jaw. She frowns, trying to make sense of the constellation of features. She can take her time to look at him, for once. His face is part of the puzzle she’s worked on since the moment he took off his helmet on Starkiller. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever solve it, but this is part of it. 

More daring, she touches a loose curl of his hair that has fallen across a cheekbone. Rubs it between two fingers. Rey sighs at the feel of it, as soft as she’d ever imagined. It’s like warm silk when it pours across her fingertips. 

Emboldened now, she scoots closer to him on the bed. They both fell into bed wearing most of their clothing, preventing any more detailed examination of Ben’s person, but she can review the shape of his ears, the scatter of beauty marks across his face and neck, and the dark sweep of his eyelashes against his cheek. Holding her breath, Rey brushes her fingertip across Ben’s lower lip. His eyelids flutter, but she has her answer: his lips are as warm and smooth as they look. 

Ben wakes up in a rush of breath, but he doesn’t move a single muscle. The only change is the narrow crack of his gaze as he watches her touch him. He inhales very lightly, as though he is trying to still his entire body. So Rey resumes her circuit of his mouth with her finger, tracing the fine, romantic shape of it. 

When he makes no move to either stop or embrace her, Rey licks her own lips. She rolls her chest up against his arm. Then slowly, so slowly, leans over him. Her breasts press up against his shoulder as she leans down. 

His body is pampered. His hair and skin are clean and cared for; even his lips are smooth. And Rey is greedy for it. To become clean and cared for. Sleek and perfect. When she runs her lower lip against his, the bitten and flaking flesh of it snags against his. But Ben makes a small sound, deep in his throat, and parts his mouth. His hand comes up to wrap around her elbow, and the small point of contact is unexpectedly erotic. 

In the past, they’ve collided. Striking past each other, struggling for control. His fingers pressing into the soft flesh of her arm is something different: an invitation.

She doesn’t want to walk down that road right now. She only wants to feel the slip of his soft lips against hers. Wearing them smooth. It’s less a kiss than a caress.

Whatever it might have become, it ends when Rey feels Ben’s heart rate kick into hyperdrive and his chest go rigid.

It’s nothing like the times that Ben has appeared to her through their bond. There’s no expansion of awareness. No rush of the Force. Instead, Rey only realizes that they are not alone when she hears the voice grate:

“I can’t _believe it_!” 

Rey flips instantly to her back, her hand groping for her lightsaber...until she lets it drop.

It’s not an enemy. It’s Luke. Glowing faintly blue and _furious_. 

Luke has evidently had the chance to run by the Jedi afterlife headquarters since she last saw him, and he appears younger and better-kept. Much more like the dream of Luke Skywalker she cherished as a lonely little girl on Jakku than the grumpy hermit she had to hit with a stick until he saw sense.

Out of the corner of her eye, Rey sees Kylo’s expression shift from his initial shock and fear to something more self-possessed. 

Rey goes to an elbow and gives Luke’s ghost a level stare. Of all the moments he could have chosen. The Galaxy needed a Jedi, she needed a teacher, and he turns up to scold her for falling into bed with his nephew?

“You turned your back on the Jedi, on everything you believed in. All your friends. Leia. For _this_?” Luke is winding himself up for a good, long rant. Rey can recognize it from less than a week’s tutelage, and Ben obviously has a lifetime’s experience being scolded by Luke Skywalker. 

So Ben lies back against the pillows, weaving his leg between Rey’s feet. He puts one hand posessively over her hip, ignoring her affronted look. 

“You should have given this a try once or twice,” he coos at Luke’s ghost. “If you had, you might not have been such a gaping asshole your entire life.”

Rey jabs Ben in the ribs with her elbow, and he releases her but does not turn his heavy-lidded stare of challenge away from Luke.

“Not the point right now,” Rey hisses to Ben, then scoots to the edge of the bed.

Luke has turned away from them, one hand pressed dramatically to his forehead. How he survived six years alone on Ahch-To without an audience to his histrionics, Rey isn’t sure. Rey compresses her lips and folds her arms under her breasts, then unfolds them. She doesn’t want to look like a child caught stealing sweets. 

“Master Skywalker, I have not turned my back on what I believe in,” she tells him. “We are going to defeat the Emperor and bring peace to the galaxy. If you have decided to help us-” and Rey amends that when Ben gives her a cool stare, “-help _me_ _,_ then tell us something useful. How did he survive? How do we kill him?”

Luke scoffs, swirling his Jedi robes around him. “You think there’s some kind of trick to it? The only thing that can drive out the Dark is the Light.”

Rey exchanges a look with Ben, who sends an unspoken reassurance that ‘yes, he is always like this.’ 

“Yes, but, you tried that, didn’t you?” Rey asks. “You and your father both used the Light to defeat the Emperor. And then Anakin chucked him down an air shaft, didn’t he?”

Luke frowns at her. “Well, that was not the point of it.”

“You’re not offering me anything to work with,” Rey objects. “Just go, cloaking myself in the light, and off him with a laser sword? Why would that work any better this time?”

“This time, the ancient Jedi will be with you,” Luke says, a bit huffily.

Ben rolls over and puts a pillow over the back of his head. Rey snatches it off. If Luke’s dispensing wisdom, she wants to know what Ben thinks of it.

“Well, where have they been all these years? Where were you when you needed them? Where were they when Ben needed them?” Rey demands.

“They needed someone worthy,” Luke tells her. “Someone who isn’t in...great peril of falling to the Dark.” 

“You can’t kill someone with worthiness!” Ben yells, finally joining the conversation now that Rey has taken away his hiding place. 

Luke startles. He looks between Rey and Ben. 

“You shouldn’t even be able to see me,” he mutters. 

“You said I would,” Ben snarls right back. “I would have prefered you to be wrong.” 

Luke stares at the ceiling as though in search of guidance from the other ghosts of the Force. Finding none, he regroups.

“You are falling, Rey! The Dark offers you what you want, and you can’t help but go running into its... _arms_. The Dark side will bring about the destruction of everything you hold dear, and you can’t even perceive the threat!” 

Both Luke and Rey look at Ben, and she wonders what Luke sees in him, because she _can’t_ see the threat. Ben’s face is puffy and creased from sleep. He has stubble on his chin and a blemish next to his nose. He looks nothing but human, right now. Not the monster in a mask who killed his own father. Not the young demigod who destroyed Luke’s temple. Just a man who wishes his uncle would stop shouting and get out of his bedchamber. 

“You can’t possibly expect to counter the Emperor’s power with Ren’s. It won’t work. It will rebound right at you.” 

Rey squints at him. Luke obviously thinks of a counter in terms of swinging a laser sword at the Emperor’s physical person, which makes very little sense. In Rey’s experience, it matters very little to the person on the receiving end of a violent act what the motives of the actor are. Hurt is hurt. Dead is dead. What does it matter that the Emperor is Dark and Rey Light, if her only purpose is to destroy him? It should matter more that the Emperor is already dead and Rey is alive. 

The Jedi, Rey thinks, should have cared more for life and less for Light. 

“You need to balance the Force,” Luke tells Rey earnestly, oblivious to her epiphany. “You cannot drive out the Dark with more darkness. And Ben is...not back in the Light. Obviously.” 

“I can still hear you,” Ben grumbles, finally turning in the bed and swinging to a seated position. 

“Balance,” Rey muses. “Like the Jedi and the Sith, fighting each other through the ages?” 

Ben stands up and stalks to the refresher, leaving her and Luke alone. She supposes that’s progress in their relationship. Trust. She hears the water turn on and cabinets rattling. 

“I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did,” Luke says, pacing and glaring. “The Dark is corrupting. It took so many of our best. Dooku. Anakin. Ben. Even me, when it counted.” 

“I don’t either, Master Skywalker,” Rey tells him. “But loving your father, that wasn’t a mistake, was it? Seeing the Light in him.”

“Ben isn’t my father,” Luke grits out. 

“Well, thank the Force for that,” Rey says. “Because I want him to live.”

* * *

Luke is exorcised by the time Ben emerges, damp-haired and dressed in a pair of low-slung exercise pants. Rey closes her eyes against that appealing visual and expels him from her chambers so that she can prepare herself for the fight the Jedi have doomed her with. She contents herself with the small, animal pleasures at hand. The hot water of the ‘fresher. The flaky pastries the servitor droid brings for her breakfast. The clothing selection she peruses afterwards. Rey can wear whatever she wants, the droid informs her, as long as it’s black.

Rey instructs the droid to investigate supplies of cloth in other colors, but takes delivery of a close-fitting, long-sleeved gown with split skirts and a wide, angular neckline. Black, unfortunately, but at least she’ll match everything else on the ship. 

Rey contemplates doing something different with her hair, in terms of braids or ornaments, but ultimately elects to wear it loose. Light drives out Dark, but life drives back death, she thinks, tucking her hair behind her ears, and she feels very alive this morning. 

She can’t see Ben’s face beneath his mask when the portal to her quarters opens, but she can sense the particularly masculine flavor of his impatience as he waits for her to be ready. And then the attitude adjustment he undergoes when he sees her: clean, for once, in a dress, with her hair loose and brushing her shoulders. 

She steps forward and takes both of his hands in hers, and he clutches them back, at an uncharacteristic loss for words. She’d like to hear the words he’s thinking about her spoken aloud someday, she thinks. Beautiful. Perfect. Powerful. 

But they aren’t alone there; the corridors are now buzzing with activity as stormtroopers and soldiers patrol and transverse the officers’ quarters on errands. They slow when they see Ben and Rey, though. Their Supreme Leaders. Rey hasn’t seen whatever bulletin Ben has sent out about her, but she can feel the swell of emotions in the First Order troops as they see her. It feels something like hope. Something like pride. They like the look of their dark lord, hand in hand with the pretty Jedi. The symmetry of it. The promise. 

Rey can’t savor it as long as she’d like; if they’re already in orbit above Exegol, it is time to confront the Emperor. 

Ben is surprised when she asks to transfer to the flagship instead of shuttling to the ground. As much as they both deny it, he is Luke’s pupil first and foremost. Their minds still run on parallel tracks. When Ben contemplates taking power from the Emperor, it is at the point of a lightsaber. 

This big idiot, Rey thinks fondly, had a galactic military force at his command and still went alone into his enemy’s stronghold to defeat him. This is why he needs her.

“Ben, we need to make sure there’s something left to come back to here before we go,” she warns him. “We’ll do it where everyone can see us, or they'll probably mutiny before we get back.” 

Ben acquiesces, but his air is distracted as they return to the launch bay and give orders to ready his command shuttle for the transfer to the _Derriphan._ Rey keeps her shoulders squared and face impassive as she matches his stride, but she notices the way his hand clenches on the hilt of his lightsaber, and the way his wrists shake on the controls, once they’re seated in the cockpit of the shuttle. 

She lays one hand on his arm and leans close so that their guards can’t hear her voice.

“Ben, what’s wrong?”

His helmet tilts away, and Rey feels a swirl of the Force around them. The chill of the Dark. 

“The Emperor,” he says, under his breath. “I think. Sometimes he speaks in other voices.”

“What is he saying?” Rey asks.

Ben doesn’t answer, but Rey can just guess. He’s telling Ben that she’ll betray him. That she’s manipulating him. The Emperor is ordering him to bring Rey to Exegol immediately. 

Or maybe he’s offering Ben things. Telling him he won’t have to share power with Rey if he does the Emperor’s bidding. Telling him that the Emperor knows secrets of the Force from his over-long life that Ben and Rey will never uncover. 

The Dark grows thicker around them until it is almost choking. Until Rey can nearly hear the Emperor’s voice too. It sucks the warmth from her body and the air from her chest. They’re high above Exegol, but still well within his influence, it seems. 

Rey slides her hand up Ben’s arm past his shoulder to his throat. Presses on the catches of the helmet until Ben obliges her and lifts it off. 

Immediately, some of the pressure around them releases, and Rey glares at the helmet in displeasure. She takes it away from Ben and tosses it over her shoulder. 

“You have a nice face,” she says, and has to suppress a laugh at the skeptical look Ben gives her. “No, I like to see it. Also, have you considered that helmet might be cursed?” 

Ben shakes his head in faint confusion. His expression is muddled, but clearing as Rey cups his cheek, rubbing a tender thumb across his scar.

“Don’t listen to him,” Rey whispers. “He’s not real. I’m real.” 

“Are you?” Ben asks. His hands still clench and unclench in his lap. His gaze goes straight to the surface of the planet, hanging full and ominous in the corner of the viewfinder. 

She wants to kiss him. Rub the fragile, uncertain expression off his face. Reassure him that she has more to offer him than the Emperor. Or at least better. But she doesn’t want him to ever wonder if she’s manipulating him. If her love is dependent on his goodness, or worse, his compliance. But her fingers on his cheekbone still and anchor him. He remembers the sensation of her fingertips pressed against his, an image held somewhere deep in heart like a talisman over the past year. 

Ben takes a deep breath and tilts the throttle towards the _Derriphan._

* * *

The Dark is thick on the deck of the Star Destroyer. It clogs her nostrils and sidles down the back of her neck when Rey and Ben emerge to a welcome party consisting of the Knights of Ren, the armored warriors Rey has seen thus far only in nightmares or from a distance. Up close, they stink. Rust and dried blood and unwashed bodies. Bits of fur and grime cling to their armor and weapons. Ben does not seem to notice either the smell or the way their attention clings to Rey as they assess their new dyad leadership. 

_Not allowed in the house_ , is Rey’s first, hysterical thought, as they surround her. She barely keeps from doing something embarrassing, like clutching Rey’s arm or pulling out her lightsaber and decapitating the one creeping closest to her. 

They are background noise to Ben, and they part as he walks through them, and fall in behind as Rey follows Ben towards the bridge. The docking bay is very small on this Star Destroyer; the superweapon takes the place of the launch bay. 

“Why don’t you send them to Exegol first,” Rey whispers to Ben as they take a separate lift to the command center. “See what they can smash. I’m sure they’re good at smashing things.” 

Ben lifts his eyebrows at her. “They won’t defend me against a challenger from the Dark,” he says. “It’s against their code.”

“Then what is the point of them?” Rey demands, frustrated. "Why do you even keep them around?" 

Ben thinks for a moment. His lips twitch.

“Aesthetics?” he ultimately suggests. 

Rey grinds her teeth as the portal to the command center unfurls and they see the sweeping vista of Exegol over the bow of the starship. Officers stand at attention at their stations, with one grey-haired human in general’s bars advancing to salute them. 

“General Pryde,” Ben mentions offhandedly. “He commands the Final Order fleet.”

Ben’s voice is distant. His gaze is turned inward, and Rey knows he still fights against the foreign whispers haunting his mind. 

Rey meets the man’s stare, feeling for him in the Force. His eyes remind her of the lidless scrutiny of a nightwatcher worm, and there is far too much Dark energy converging around him for Rey’s comfort. 

“Nice to meet you,” she says flatly. 

“Supreme Leader,” he replies, and his tone turns it into a joke.

“Status report,” she spits back, keeping her expression still. 

He brings up a holo of the planet Exegol, and turns the display. Pryde zooms out, and shows her the hundred Star Destroyers arrayed in orbit nearby, comprising the Sith Eternal fleet. 

“The legacy First Order ships are still on mission throughout the Galaxy,” he explains. “The Final Order is mustered here and ready to advance on the Core by way of the remaining unaffiliated planets--upon the Emperor’s order.” 

“I see,” Rey says. “How does the Emperor convey his commands, then? I understood that he was confined to Exegol, groundside. Without easy communication to the rest of the fleet.”

Pryde narrows those unnatural grey eyes at her. “He has devolved his authority to the Final Order. Through this capital ship.” 

Rey steps down to the prow of the bridge, looking out through the hemispherical transparisteel dome. 

“Are the Final Order ships ready to deploy? Are they fully crewed and armed?” She looks down at the surface of Exegol. No lights gleam to mark points of civilization on the dead planet. Ben has described the empty halls of the Sith Arena. The experimentation tanks. The wretched creatures under glass. She wonders whether her own family’s origins lie there. Whether she’ll ever know for sure. 

“Yes,” Pryde gloats. “For a generation, the loyal subjects of the Emperor have prepared for this day. They will sweep out from the Unknown Region in their multitudes, and the entire Galaxy will soon know their order.”

The other officers of the deck are breathing very shallowly. Most of them are natives of Outer Rim human planets, raised in civilization and plenty. They joined the First Order for varied reasons--greed, pride, boredom, ambition--but they serve now out of fear.

“Prepare the fleet to make the jump to hyperspace,” Rey commands. “Withdraw beyond the termination shock. Remain in position. The fleet embarks today.” One way or the other, Rey knows this is true.

General Pryde’s delay in acknowledging her order leads Ben to break his reverie and turn a furious gaze upon him.

“As the Supreme Leader instructed,” Ben hisses at him. 

Pryde nods stiffly and turns to the deck to translate Rey’s words into technical specifications and coordinates. The officers begin to murmur into their headsets and touch displays. 

Pryde completes the order and turns back to them. 

“Of course, you know you cannot depart without the Emperor’s permission,” Pryde says, his eyes swirling with borrowed power.

“We’ll get to that,” Rey tells him, trying to project more calm than she feels. She folds her hands behind her back. 

“What are the communication capabilities of this ship?” She asks him, changing the subject. 

He is briefly thrown, but responds readily enough, informing her that as the flagship, the _Derriphan_ is capable of instant communication with any vessel in the FInal Order fleet, and, via those relays, the entire empire. 

“And the weapons systems?” She makes her voice very casual.

He smirks. “An axial superlaser, as you saw on Kijimi. Each of the _Xyston_ -class is so equipped. All of the power of Starkiller Base, but far more mobile.” 

Rey nods. She searches the room. The expressions she meets range from hostility to curiosity to indifference. 

Ben is the only one not looking at her. His eyes are closed, and his face is contorted. The Emperor is hard at work.

Rey doesn’t have much time.

Rey walks slowly to the top of the bridge and places herself between Pryde and Ben. 

“Very well,” she says. “I would like to see it in action.”

Ben swings his head around to stare at her, his face going white and blank. 

Pryde openly gapes at her, rage beginning bubble up into his expression.

“There.” Rey lifts her entire arm and points at Exegol. “Deploy the axial superlaser. Destroy the Sith Citadel.”

 _No!_

A voice somewhere in Rey’s mind. She can’t identify the source. Luke, perhaps. 

Next to her, Ben covers his ears with his hands. 

“Yes, ma’am,” a young First Order officer says from the first row. “Deploying axial superlaser. Begin ignition sequence.” She lifts a hand to touch the weapons display.

General Pryde wheels on her. “That’s an illegal order. Belay it!” 

The woman hesitates, turning to look between Rey and the Final Order officer. The other officers are confused; Pryde, they know. Their Supreme Leader, they know. The Emperor, to most of them, was a myth. Rey was an enemy. They don't know where their loyalties lie; they don't know which option offers them the greatest chance of waking up the next day. 

“Stand down, General Pryde,” Rey says. “I do not recognize the Emperor’s authority. He was slain by his apprentice, Darth Vader. By your own laws, he is no longer the lord of the Sith.”

Pryde reaches for the blaster at his belt, and Rey jerks it from his hand with the Force. She sends it flying from his grasp, and each officer on the bridge watches it clatter against the bulkhead and fall to the ground. 

“I said _stand down_ ,” Rey snarls. “Nobody needs to die today who is not already dead. Continue the ignition sequence.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Rey sees Ben double over as though in pain. The Dark is getting stronger. More present.

_Stop it, Rey! This is not the way!_

More voices in her head. The vague, blue outlines of men in robes flicker at the edges of her vision. 

Pryde’s eyes seem to suck up the energy of the room. 

“You think you can use my own weapon against me?” Pryde says. His voice has changed; it is raspy, distant. The pupils of his eyes are no longer visible. His mouth opens further than his jaw should allow, and all Rey can see down his throat is darkness. “Foolish child. I made these ships. As I made you. Every warm body in this room is my tool to use as I see fit!”

“You have no power over me,” Rey growls. “And this ship is ours. You failed. You are the past. We are the future.” 

From the displays, Rey can see that the Sith Fleet is quietly waiting out in dark space. Their commanders are watching this fight. They have not turned on the _Derriphan._ They will await the outcome of this struggle before following orders. The Sith believe in the creative power of death. If she can defeat Palpatine, they will follow her. 

“Kill the Jedi!” Pryde howls in Palpatine’s voice, and several of the officers reach for their sidearms, their bodies stiff and wooden. 

Rey calls upon the Force and jerks Pryde towards her. His feet jerk as he skids along the floor under her invisible grip. His body shields her from the first volley of blasts before she can ignite her lightsaber and block the next. He makes no sound as he dies, and the destructive swirl of the Force does not lessen for his demise. 

“Ben, a little help here!” she yells, deflecting the next round of blaster bolts back to her attackers. 

Pryde’s body slumps to the ground, but then rolls face over, limbs twisting unnaturally like a child's doll caught in a downpour. 

“Ben!”

Rey can barely hear her own voice over the noise of the Jedi masters shouting at her, half the Final Order officers shooting at her, the other half screaming and running away, but she is aware of a great swirl of the Dark Side of the Force gathering strength in the command center. 

When she can spare a glance for Ben, she sees him contorted on the floor, hands curled into fists next to his face.

 _“You fool._ ” It comes from Pryde’s body, but it does not even resemble a human noise when it echoes out of him. The body flops bonelessly to its back, then arches as the Emperor’s spirit animates it. 

Two more FIrst Order officers fall, caught by the rebounds off of Rey’s lightsaber. 

“Fire the kriffing cannon!” Rey yells, looking desperately for Ben, the Jedi, anyone. There are still two officers in the very prow of the ship following her instructions, and she sees them frantically turning the controls to bring the gun online. 

“ _Nobody will help you_ ,” Palpatine howls through his puppet. “ _I was in his mind before he drew breath. He will never be yours. He has always been_ **_mine_**.” 

Rey barely gets her saber lifted in time to block the first branching cast of lightning from the body of General Pryde. 

There should be no wind in space, but it is beginning to rage through the chamber, crackling with electricity and malevolence. The Emperor might be able to short out the entire ship before it can fire. If he fries the consoles, it won't matter that he's groundside and Rey's in control his weapon. 

Pryde’s body rises off the floor, the whites of his dead eyes darkening as he fills with the Emperor’s power. He lifts his hand towards Rey again, and she tightens her grip on the lightsaber. 

The Jedi’s voices are a chorus of lament. 

The last two officers manning the deck have broken and fled. 

“ _I made your father. I can make another_ ,” Palpatine hisses as he opens Pryde’s hand for the killing cast. 

The floor of the ship shakes violently, and Rey falls back, losing her balance. She braces herself for the shock of the Sith lightning in her chest...and it does not come.

When she opens her eyes, she sees Ben, on his knees. His hand on the control panel. The board blinking red.

And through the transparisteel windows of the bridge, the axial lasers firing on Exegol. 

_Boom._

Fire and dust bloom on the planet's surface.

_Boom._

Cracks appear in its mantle.

_Boom._

Just like Kijimi. 

Pryde’s body turns to ash. The flakes are caught by the swirling winds of the Dark and tossed through the room before they clog air vents and Rey’s lungs. Pryde's body dissolves from the shape of a man to a pile of debris.

Outside, the same thing is happening to Exegol. The bridge shakes every time the ship fires, and the sphere collapses into a disk, and then a ring, as the planetkiller breaks the bonds of gravity holding the dead planet together. 

Otherwise, it is very quiet. 

Rey blinks back tears as she feels the Jedi depart, wordlessly, trailing disappointment and grief. Ben’s noisy breathing is the loudest sound on the bridge, even though she can hear shouting and alarms echoing through the bulkheads from somewhere outside. 

He scrabbles with the neck of his tunic as though it is choking him, finally ripping it open and exposing his throat. It pulses and recedes as he draws sobbing breaths. Rey crawls through the ash, landing a hand on his ankle, then his thigh. His lips are bloody like he’s bitten them through, and there are little constellations of petechiae in his eyes where the small vessels have burst. 

“S-sorry,” he gasps. “I wanted to help, but I-” Rey worms her hand through the torn collar of his shirt and gets her fingers against the hot skin over his heart. It’s beating so quickly she’s worried he’ll pass out. 

“You did, Ben, you did,” Rey croons, choking back tears as she pulls herself into his lap. “It’s all going to be good now. They’re gone.”

“They’re all gone,” Ben agrees, wiping the blood off his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s just us now.”

“Just us.” 

When the deck crew finally grows brave enough to unlock the hatch to the command center and reenter the bridge, they are shocked to find their Supreme Leaders alone and alive there, still holding each other on the floor. Some of the crew later say they were laughing, and others said they were crying, and they were all correct. Rey and Ben didn’t quite know how to feel their own emotions yet--only two bodies, only two minds, only one soul. Finally free. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope to respond to comments before the crippling guilt slays me. 
> 
> Also, I had to increase the chapter count because the outline originally called for some plot in this chapter too. 
> 
> Here, have some fucking.

They are separated almost immediately. Ben needs to soak his whole head in bacta and reestablish lines of command in the First Order in light of recent fatalities and executions. The Knights of Ren are due for some trust exercises which may or may not involve Ben peeling their minds like grapes. 

Rey, in turn, feels the sudden responsibility for some three million crew of the Sith Eternal fleet. They've hung quiet and still in the sky since the Emperor fell again. 

Rey thinks of her lonely childhood on Jakku, waiting on some unknowable errand to be worthy of love. Life bloomed on a desert planet; it grew on the cold empty wastes of Exegol. Both sides of the Force flowed there, just like everywhere else in the universe. 

Rey tells herself that it is very important to keep this in mind as she establishes contact with their fleet of nearly one hundred star destroyers, each equipped with a superweapon capable of destroying worlds. 

Once she has lured sufficient trembling and wild-eyed officers back to crew the bridge (it is easier to find stormtroopers to remove the bodies and debris, because they have all Seen Some Shit), Rey slicks her hair behind her ears and picks a ship at random to hail. 

The captain of the _Corvax_ is a woman barely older than Rey. Her skin is olive but faded, as though she’s never been out in the sun. Of course, growing up on Exegol as she must have, there’s no guarantee she ever has been. 

She’s flanked by Sith troopers in blood red armor, and her face is impassive as she examines Rey: speckled with blood and ashes, still clutching her lightsaber. 

“Are you the commander of the _Corvax_?” Rey asks, twisting her hands around the repaired fault in the hilt. 

“Yes, Empress,” the woman replies, without any tone to indicate either irony or respect. 

Rey blinks. She’s a glad Ben wasn’t there when that title was casually dropped into the room like a pebble of cesium in a tub of water. 

“I am Captain Mulgrew,” the woman continues, back rigid. “The _Corvax_ is at your command.” 

“I- thank you,” Rey breathes. “Is that true for the other ships?” Rey’s greatest fear was infighting among ninety star destroyers. She knows there are currents of rebellion within the First Order already as corrupt elements consume the organization from within, but even one _Xyston_ -class ship which decides that it does not recognize Rey and Ben’s authority is capable of taking out the rest of the fleet. 

“Yes, Empress,” the captain says, as though the answer is obvious. “You are the granddaughter of Darth Sidious. He is the grandson of Darth Vader. You killed Darth Sidious. This is how mastery has always been resolved. There are now two. We serve the Sith.” 

“Er, good,” Rey says, deciding that who exactly is or is not a Sith is best left unexamined at this moment in time in light of the possibility that Captain Mulgrew cares deeply about the particularities of it. 

“Your orders, Empress?” 

Rey startles again at the title. It feels like something that should require a little more in the way of ceremony or paperwork. And possibly a long talk with Ben about the nature of their relationship. If he’s not considered the new Emperor, he is probably going to kick up a fuss about it. If he is, does that make them married?

Somewhere, Ben is startled by that thought. 

“Keep firing guns on Exegol,” Rey says. “I don’t want to see a rock out there bigger than a roast porg.” 

There will be no protractors, no knives, no Wayfinders this time. Rey doesn’t intend to leave anything big enough to be considered a graveyard behind . 

“And then?”

“Then we’ll depart the system. We need to establish a new home planet for this fleet. Please send me a list of uninhabited garden worlds in the Outer Rim by tomorrow morning.” 

Captain Mulgrew salutes her again and closes the connection. 

“Transmit this correspondence to the other ships in the fleet,” Rey orders to a baby-faced lieutenant who appears as though he might be a communications officer. 

Rey considers whether she ought to go through all ninety ships and make a personal connection with each of the commanding officers. That might be a thing she should do. 

She also considers that Ben is somewhere else on the ship, thinking very strong thoughts about her. 

After due consideration, she decides that introductions to ninety Sith cultist captains can wait for the next day. 

“Another thing,” she tells her new communications officer when he moves to comply with her directives. “Have we received any messages from the Resistance fleet?”

He shakes his head. “No, Supreme Leader,” he says. “The...Supreme Leader. The last Supreme Leader. The-” he swallows hard. “Snoke. After the incident at D’Qar. He thought it was best not to accept communications from the Resistance. Too...confusing.”

Rey draws a blank until she recalls one of Poe’s less believable war stories. Didn’t he say that he had flirted with a First Order general until his ship blew up? There was probably more to it. 

“Cancel that order. If the Resistance contacts us, I want to know it,” she says. Then smiles, remembering the rest of the story. “Is General Hux still alive?” 

“In the brig,” one of the ensigns calls from the back of the room. “Recuperating for his execution, I believe.” 

“Cancel that order as well,” Rey says, finding another spark of joy in this overlong day. “I’m appointing General Hux as my personal envoy to Commander Dameron. Patch him up and put him on a ship to Batuu. He’s going to negotiate an armistice for us.” 

* * *

She doesn’t know if the quarters she takes belonged to the recently deceased General Pryde, but if so, they’ve been cleansed of any personalization he added. He didn’t seem to have been very personal of a person, and Rey, who slept in a fallen AT-AT for years, has no sentimentality about such things. 

No, if she is prepared to be missish about anything, it is the intentionality of the way she must prepare for Ben to return from his own mission. That small portion of her that still worries what the Resistance would think of her as she washes off in the fresher. Her hands on her own body feel very different today. 

She can’t pretend, as she combs her hair, that she doesn’t intend this. She’s not weak for him. She’s not mistaken for him. 

She wants him as she leaves her hair loose and damp around her shoulders. She wants him as she dons only a loose shift that leaves her arms and legs bare. She wants him as she waits for him by the window. 

The other ships in the fleet are still firing on Exegol, and each pulse of their axial lasers sends a pulse of silent white light across Rey’s field of vision. The shielding on the _Derriphan_ deflects the debris of the dead planet, and the strikes explode like fireworks. 

Rey wraps her arms across her stomach and watches the light show. The floor is cold beneath her bare feet, but the act of waiting--waiting with intention, waiting with purpose--makes her squirm in a pleasant way. 

Ben’s not one for sentimentality either. When he enters the room, he doesn’t call her name or greet her. He simply walks to her and stands next to her, because he knows her mind, and she knows his. He’s lost his gloves and helmet, though not the rest of the costume of Kylo Ren. 

In a way, it’s the first time they’ve ever been alone together. 

So Rey reaches out and strokes a finger down the back of Ben’s hand. He spreads his fingers and twines them around hers as they look upon the end of the war between the Sith and the Jedi. 

He tugs her hand to pull her in front of him. He squares her hips in front of him, then cages her shoulders with his arms. It brings his mouth close to her ear, and his lips skate the upper shell of it before he whispers to her to look out at the stars.

She would turn her head to look up at him, but he wraps his arms more tightly around her and blocks her from moving her head. 

“No, look,” he says quietly. “All of it. Everything you can see. It’s all yours.”

“Ben,” Rey begins, and he lifts a hand to cover her mouth. 

“I know you didn’t come here for me,” he says, in a rougher voice. “I know. Don’t try to deny it, we’ve always spoken the truth to each other. But do you think you could stay for me? I want...I think we want the same things now. And now that you have it, do you think you’ll stay with me? For me?” 

Ben’s listening to her mind, not just her words, for her answer, so Rey tries to organize her thoughts clearly, even though she’s being battered by his own.

The barrier between them has not been her feelings or his. It’s his actions, her words. He can’t change the things he’s done, and she can’t speak the words to absolve him. And she still can’t say that there is nothing he could do that would make her leave. There are lines, still, that she will not cross. And she can’t say that there is nothing she could tell him that would make him leave her. 

And yet. There is still space for them, in that place between. She believes it. She doesn’t know if she’ll always be with him. But she knows she’ll always want to. 

The answer he’s looking for is when he slides his hand down to cradle her chin, she parts her lips to catch one of his fingers between them instead. He shudders when her tongue brushes against the ridges of his fingertip. Cants his hips forward when she closes her mouth around it and sucks. 

His other hand slides around her hip to her stomach and presses against it. His palm is centered over her navel, and his fingers point down. She covers it with her two hands, and curls her fingers over his own, gathering the loose fabric of her shift in them. Together, they pull it up and over her head, leaving her bare to the chill of the room. 

She would expect some of the tension to leave him now, since he has his answer, but his body is still stiff where it is pressed against hers. His free hand traces over the surface of her skin, barely skimming it. It’s not unpleasant, but it’s nearly ticklish and not particularly progressive. Rey presses her hips back against him, and he touches her with only fractional new firmness.

If Rey had ever contemplated what it would be like to go to bed with Kylo Ren--or even with Ben, once she came to think of him that way--she would have assumed it to be rather like piloting a starfighter through an asteroid belt whilst being pursued by TIE fighters. Hard, fast, and liable to end with serious injuries. 

Maybe it would have been like that, had she given into his demands. If he’d felt like he won. 

But now he bends his head and presses his lips to the side of her neck, just below her ear. When he sighs, his breath spills down her body. His hands both move to her breasts, and they only cup her loosely. His lips press against her jugular, but he keeps his teeth sheathed. 

It’s only when his thumb traces a too-gentle circuit around her nipple that she realizes that he is spending all his concentration on perceiving what she does. Feeling what she feels. 

He was a boy who broke things, who grew into a man who broke people, and he doesn’t believe he can touch her without hurting her, although he’s determined not to. Ben is trembling behind her, caught, as she is, between two opposing objects: his burning desire to erode their physical boundaries until they are consumed with each other, counter to his fear of getting it wrong somehow and shaming himself before her.

Rey had not really expected to think so hard about this. She’d wanted to stick her tongue between his red lips and get a closer look at his chest muscles, that was the extent of her plans. 

But unless she still wants to be standing here when Exegol is nothing more than dust in the solar winds, it’s up to her once again. 

So she takes one of his big, stiff hands and pulls it between her legs, and positions the pad of his thumb where she wants it. It’s different when it’s his hand on her, instead of her own. He’s surprised that she’s wet when he touches her; she can’t tell whether he’s surprised that she wants him, or if that particular facet of biology was simply not part of either the Jedi or Sith curriculum. 

He picks up the rhythm from her hand over his, and then she pulls her hand away so she can brace herself against the window with her head on her forearm. The pressure of her ass against his own clothed cock makes him lose track of what he’s doing, and she winces. 

“Focus,” she tells him sternly, until his finger circles her clit again. 

“Just this?” he asks, and she almost responds in the affirmative until she realizes that he’s talking about limits, not longitude. 

“That’s what I know feels good,” she shrugs, even though a familiar tension is beginning to coil around her breasts and stomach. It does feel good, just the slow movement of his thumb against her, and the delicate support of his other hand on her breast. 

Ben makes a thoughtful sound and widens his stance. Then presses one thick finger against her entrance. 

“Yes?” he asks, even though she’s so wet now that it seems like nothing for him to slick one finger inside her. 

It’s not a thing she does by herself, but it seems like a valuable proof of concept, and she nods, feeling Ben’s warm, silky hair brush her cheek as she does. 

It’s shocking, still, the feel of a part of him inside of her. He’s been in her mind, he knows her thoughts, yes, but--

“No, keep doing that,” Rey stutters, when he would withdraw. “Keep doing...exactly that.” 

It’s not more difficult than piloting a spaceship through an uncharted star system, he’s thinking, as his thumb and forefinger work her in tandem. Maybe more difficult than piloting a spaceship through an uncharted star system while ignoring a throbbing erection. 

“It’s good,” Rey grunts, because she doesn’t want him to get discouraged and stop. She gets the sense that this sort of thing doesn’t take him nearly so long, which doesn’t make her inclined to allow any substitutions, even though he is rapidly connecting the dots inside his head. 

“You like this?” he clarifies as he draws a fingertip along her inner walls, pausing on a place that makes Rey clamp down around him. 

Rey is a little embarrassed by the sound she makes in response. He pumps his finger in and out, then hits it again. 

“You know,” he says, in the tone of a man who has finally had a good idea, “I have a-”

“I know what you have,” Rey says, not opening her eyes. She can feel it pressing against her lower back, and the impression it gives is daunting. She locks her knees where they feel in imminent danger of giving out. “And we’re working up to that. If you stop what you’re doing, I’ll…”

She doesn’t want to say ‘kill you’ when she’s actually tried to do that. But Ben gets the correct impression anyway, even chuckles softly in her ear. His confidence is growing by the second, and when he sucks her earlobe into his mouth and bites down none too gently, Rey yelps and comes around his finger in a cascade of warm shocks. 

He’s barely patient enough to let her come down from it before he spins her and presses her back against the window. 

She doesn’t have to wonder about those full lips again. They’re pressed against hers, around hers, sucking hers. His hands knead her bare hips until she tenses them to jump. As if they’ve practiced that move a thousand times, he catches her neatly so that she can wrap her legs around his wide waist and ruin his tunic with her wet cunt. 

Her weight is nothing to him; he backs up seamlessly towards the bed where he has the vague idea that anatomy and geometry will be more forgiving of his inexperience. 

Even if his pupils are blown black and his hands are nearly shaking with want, he manages to set her down gently before clawing at his own clothing. 

It’s a show Rey doesn’t plan on missing, even if he squirms under her inspection as he pulls off shirts and socks and more underclothes than she expected. When he’s totally denuded he pauses, though, and gives a little shrug, as if to say, ‘this is all there is.’ 

Just lots of pale skin, cut all through with scars and beauty marks and the stray tuft of black hair. He doesn’t think much of his body, except as a useful tool. And he tilts his head, mystified, as Rey smiles at him. The muscles. The size of him. The way his cock juts eagerly from his hand. 

As always, he doesn’t spend long contemplating his change in fortune. He crawls up her bed on his hands and knees, and he doesn’t know how to be precious about it. He doesn’t kiss her body as he goes; he presses his whole face where her body catches his eye. Rubs his cheek against her ankle bone. Licks a line from her lower thigh to the soft swell of her ass. Rolls his forehead against the dip in her waist. 

He’s slow to let his weight fall over her, but the feel of it is delicious when he does. All of that size and power, cradled neatly between her legs. She enjoys it for a complete, deep breath, and then bends a leg to get a little leverage. Flips him to his back.

Ben looks very startled to find her on top of him, but that’s just owing to his inexperience, she thinks. Rey’s not totally conversant on what happens between men and women--or women and women, or men and men, or men and mono-gendered phalliform aliens--but the Resistance didn’t get great holovid reception, and fornication was one of the few free forms of entertainment they had. 

Rey’s caught sight of enough men and women in dark bunks and quiet corners and temporarily depopulated hot springs to know that sex is accomplished with the woman on top. Ben looks prepared to argue this point, but she scoots further up his body and traps his cock beneath her thigh, and he closes his mouth again. 

Rey brushes his hair away from his face tenderly and kisses the pout off his lower lip. Traces her hands down over his chest. Even with the scars, it’s gorgeous. Everything she remembered.

“I’ve heard it can hurt the first time,” she tells him seriously, and he tenses a bit. “You’ll tell me if it does, right? I’ll stop.” 

He opens his mouth to say something, but then she drags her cunt across his cock where it lies on his stomach, and he closes it again. 

Ben’s hands reach blindly out for her, and she settles them on her breasts, where they feel reassuring to the both of them. His eyes are wide and vulnerable as he watches her rise on her knees and settle herself over him. 

“Okay?” she asks him again, trying to project calm and competence, even though if she were really, very honest with herself, she would have to admit that she’s a little nervous. Like looking at a lightsaber from ten feet away and asking it to come to her. 

She puts a hand on his cock and reminds herself that it’s not any bigger than a lightsaber. Ben swallows hard. 

She doesn’t want any assistance from the Jedi, but she wills the Force to be with her as she tilts her hips to notch his tip against her body and push. His hands curl on her chest and his back arches as she slips forward. 

The Force wouldn’t create a dyad and not make this possible, she tells herself. There would be no point in putting him in her mind, and her in his--if not for this moment, this slow, gentle slide that lasts forever. She can feel his astonishment and wonder. His gratitude and relief. 

The muscles in her thighs are trembling a little; the position isn’t a typical one for her, but it’s possible that she’s overwhelmed, she acknowledges, upon reflection. And that she doesn’t quite know what to do next. His black hair is prickly against her thighs, and the stretch is a bit much, and it’s hard to feel things properly when he is looking up at her with trust and also... also, also, he calls it love…

“I know what to do,” she tells him insistently, and her voice is more watery than she’d like. She shifts her weight to the side, and that's not it at all. Tries forward, and that's only marginally better. 

“I think I can take it from here,” Ben says, releasing her breasts and rubbing his hands down her arms. “Okay?” 

She looks down at where her body is stretched around his. Nods tremulously. 

And Ben very carefully tips her over to their sides and then slides her back beneath him without slipping all the way out of her body. 

It’s easier to focus with Ben’s face closer to her own, somehow. He’s not moving his hips, even though she can tell that he’s nearly desperate to. Instead he kisses her lingeringly on her closed lips, her chin, her cheeks, the point of her nose, until she is smiling at him again. 

“Are you alright?” she asks, draping her arms around his neck. 

“I think I’ll live,” he tells her seriously.

“Do that, please,” she tells him, and then wraps her knees more tightly around his hips as he slowly rolls against her. Again. A second time, and then a third, as he finds a way to move above her that makes her body soften around his. 

She doesn't need to press her face into his neck to feel his thoughts and mind. But it makes it easier. And she likes the salty, bitter taste of his skin, and the tender resistance of his skin against her teeth. 

He wants, very desperately, to make it last a long time--she’s not sure why, because the thought makes him a little unhappy, and detracts from his pleasure, which is only growing by the minute as he rocks above her. 

Rey squeezes her intimate muscles experimentally, and the rhythm he’s established stutters. 

“Rey-” he moans, and it’s also a warning, which she still doesn’t understand, because she can tell he liked it very much. 

So she does it again, and that wins her only his hips pressing her all the way against the mattress. 

“Kriff,” he swears, slapping one hand against the headboard and jerking into the last, tiny, fractional space she had left inside her. 

The relief of his orgasm crashes against her like a sandstorm, and she blinks at the ceiling as he goes heavy and limp above her. He’s just so very...glad. For her. For the smell of her hair and the softness of her cunt. For the small scratch of her fingernails on the back of his neck. 

It takes him some minutes to realize he’s slowly crushing the air from her lungs and roll away, and they both wince a little for the shared pain of the stickiness between her legs. 

But then he’s spreading her thighs with one hand to look, with some satisfaction, at the mess they’ve made there. 

Ben brushes an admiring finger over her red and swollen cunt, and Rey allows him the intimacy once before wincing away. 

“You’ll marry me now, won’t you,” he tells her, covering his nervousness with bravado.

Rey is so surprised that she laughs. “What, you think I have to marry you because of that?”

“I-” he begins, and then gathers what little cunning he possesses to shut up entirely. 

Oh. He really did think that. “Try _asking_ me, sometime,” she tells him. Then bites him on his dumb mouth. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by "Die 4 You" by Perfume Genius. If there was any horny here, credit him. 
> 
> Kink-same me on Twitter @YTCShepard.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, I thought I last updated this a couple of weeks ago. I see that I did...not.

“Darling,” Ben asks upon entering the room, with a little bite that nearly turns it into sarcasm, “did you happen to dissolve the Stormtrooper program? Without discussing it with me?”

In the mornings, Ben likes to get up and run a few kilometers before he takes his breakfast and visits the fresher. Rey enjoys that time to herself to pick out clothing and drink a cup of caf without Ben proposing sex or marriage or ground troop movements. She thinks that she is possibly not a morning person, under ideal conditions. 

Sometimes, like today, she has breakfast meetings in her reception room. Jannah eyes Rey over the edge of her teacup, asking with her eyes whether she should leave.

No, Rey thinks. If Ben ever wants her to take his hand in a permanent way, he needs to learn how to act in public. 

“Obviously I did not,” Rey says, reaching for a plate of sliced fruit and offering it to the Supreme Leader. “There are Stormtroopers guarding our chambers right now.”

Ben is like a Loth cat in this respect; she should have known that once she let him sleep in her bed, there was no getting him out again. She’s not used to sharing personal space. Once the Resistance got off the Millenium Falcon, she’d been one of the first people allotted her own quarters. There’s plenty of room on this ship for Ben and Rey to maintain their own things, but Ben won’t hear of it. His boots nuzzle her boots in their closet. She has to use his shampoo. She wakes up with his hair in her face. (That last one isn’t really objectionable, but she hasn’t told him that.)

Ben takes a slice of jogan fruit, but is not distracted. He squints at Jannah, trying to place her. 

“Aren’t you one of those mutineers from Kef Bir?” he asks, suspiciously. 

Jannah is wearing modified Stormtrooper armor, but she’s left the helmet off. 

“The Supreme Leader offered a generous pardon and relocation package,” Jannah murmurs. 

Ben gives Rey a ‘gotcha’ glare. 

“The armistice obviously included pardons for all previous hostilities,” Rey says. “Can’t I choose my own staff?” 

“I have no objections to you choosing your own staff,” Ben grits out. “If you hire them to dissolve our military, I have some _thoughts_ about that.” 

Jannah crosses her legs and purses her lips at Ben. She suggested just killing him in his sleep, but Rey’s been able to bring her own board with the power-sharing plan. Mostly. 

“It’s not dissolved. It’s _modernized_.” 

“Sixty percent!” he yells. “You reduced our forces by sixty percent!”

Jannah points a finger at the door, and Rey sighs and nods. Jannah excuses herself, grabbing a pastry for the road. She has quarters on the ship, along with the rest of her regiment. 

“Sit,” Rey says, indicating the chair that Jannah vacated. Ben narrows his eyes at her. “Please,” she adds, because she has manners.

Decorating this chamber has become something of a hobby, in the small amount of free time she alotts herself. The walls and floors were black, there was nothing she could do about that. But she had fabric hung on the walls and carpets brought in for the floors, along with a moss garden that doesn’t require sunlight to thrive. She leaves out bowls of fruit and nuts, and uses pretty dishes on the table. 

Ben hasn’t been in here before. Whether he knows it or not, he relaxes when he sits in the cushioned chair and takes in her customization of the space. Rey pours him a cup of caf and slides it across the table to him. She waits until he has taken a sip--like a true scion of darkness, he takes it with cream and nectar--before she speaks again.

“‘Stormtrooper program review’ has been on my schedule for three weeks now. Every afternoon, for half an hour. You didn’t come to any of the meetings,” she tells him. 

She hasn’t hidden anything from him. Her entire day is scheduled out and planned, from the time she wakes until the time she sleeps. When the Supreme Leaders are naked and rolling around in their big bed, it is recorded as ‘Executive Session,’ which Rey only knows because she reviewed the time entries after the first week and found that her protocol droid was dutifully recording between twenty and forty minutes of daily ‘copulation’ before she made him change the description. 

She’s not angry at Ben for not coming to her meetings. She’s sure the scourge of space piracy is equally pressing; it’s a drag on trade, for sure, and Ben is in a very good mood when he comes home from smiting it with a laser sword. 

“You didn’t tell me you were going to scrap our ground troops. Whole installations have resigned. We’ll lose cities. Planets, even,” he digs in.

Rey hands Ben her datapad.

“Did you even look up the details before you charged over here?”

He frowns down at it. 

She knows what he’s reading, because she had this presentation ready to convince not just him, but the other senior leadership of the First Order.

The Stormtrooper program made no kriffing sense. 

Even assuming no moral objections to the practice of kidnapping small children from their families and press ganging them into lifetime service--a practice nearly guaranteed to commit the families of those children to a lifetime of vengeance--that put the First Order in the position of raising millions of small, traumatized, children to adulthood. Even then, it was impossible to tell whether the average five-year-old would grow up to be a good and fit soldier or whether he might really be better suited to xenobotany or Twi’lek opera. There was a reason why the Stormtroopers were a galactic joke, as a fighting force . 

Point the first- unpopular with civilians.

Point the second- childcare is expensive.

Point the third- effective militaries select for soldiers who are good at shooting things. 

“It’s more a vision I have for our military,” Rey says while Ben scans the data. “Where they’re all adults who can shoot straight and want to be there.” 

“You didn’t think this could wait until the Galaxy is pacified?” he argues, more from the habit of it. 

“Reform is never convenient,” she warns him. “But still, eighty percent of the force reductions are children. The rest were plotting to desert anyway. The ones who are left have much higher morale, since we’re using the funds we freed up to pay them bonuses.”

“We have to pay them?” Ben sighs. “I never got paid.” 

Maybe the lack of furnishings in Ben’s quarters was attributable more to a lack of funds than an absence of creativity? 

“Do you think you’d have left, if you could only have bought your own ship and a pension somewhere on Naboo?” she asks curiously. 

Ben hesitates. “I don’t know. Maybe.” He slumps in his chair. “I never thought I had anywhere I could go.” 

And there it is, the reason that keeps her anger at bay, every time she uncovers some fresh atrocity. She’s a happavore herder, endlessly shoveling out the poodoo of this organization. She’ll never be done. But Ben hasn’t done anything to stop her; until today, he hasn’t even rebuked her. 

He’s done terrible things. And every single one, he thought he had to do. 

“Ben,” Rey says, uncertainly. “You don’t have to…” She gathers her thoughts. “You don’t have to stay. If you wanted to go…” She’s made this offer before, hasn’t she? Or did she fail to explain it very well?

“I would make sure you were safe, if you wanted to leave. Naboo. Corellia. You don’t have to do this. I would make sure nobody came after you.” 

Ben’s dark, thick eyelashes lift. “And would you come with me?” 

“I-” Rey freezes. There is so much to be done. It’s like holding rocks in the air. If she drops one, she fears the entire Galaxy will collapse.

“I would want to,” she temporizes, and his face falls. 

She grits her teeth. What has the Galaxy ever given her? What does she owe it, that Ben hasn’t offered her?

“Yes,” she finally says. “Yes, if that’s what it took. We’d both go.” 

“If that’s what it took for what?” he croaks, his voice hoarse.

“If that’s what it took for you to be happy. If it was what you needed.” 

Ben tosses his hair back out of his face. “You don’t want to go, though. You want to do this. Change things.”

“Yes.”

He sighs. “Then I’ll stay too. I’m not going anywhere without you.” He slouches further in his chair, staring fixedly at his teacup. 

Rey looks at him, wondering where she’s gone wrong this time. It shouldn’t make him so unhappy. They have the opportunity to fix things the way they ought to be. They have each other. They _won_ _._

What does he want, even? 

“I’m fine,” he says sullenly. “I’m sure you have things to do.” 

“Nothing more than important than you,” Rey says. 

His eyes flick to her. The dressing gown she’s wearing is one of her favorite acquisitions. She’s always cold, here in space. But the dressing gown has an outer layer of Loveti moth fiber in iridescent blues and purples, and it’s lined in soft cream synthfur. It’s lovely and warm, and it covers her from wrist to ankle like a marvelous, wearable, sleeping bag. 

Rey lets it fall open a little at her throat. Ben’s eyes predictably follow the exposed skin, but then his mouth hardens. 

“Don’t coddle me like a child,” he says. 

“Very much not like with a child,” Rey says, crossing her legs and letting a bare calf dangle out of the robe. 

“That’s not going to work when you’re off reforming every institution in the First Order, and I’m still here, sitting on my thumbs,” he says, his expression tight and guarded. 

Rey nearly responds tartly that if he’d gone without for thirty years, he could handle a few diplomatic missions away, but then she remembers to listen for what he’s not saying instead of what he does. Ben somehow manages to always tell the truth and still never say what he means. 

And so Rey’s learning to listen to what people mean.

“Even when I’m not right there with you, I’m still with you,” she says, trying to meet his eyes. 

Ben ignores her, reaching for the cream with a hand that she wouldn’t see tremble if she couldn’t also feel it. 

She thinks for a moment as he serves himself caf. Then she pulls apart the knot of her belt. 

“I’m still thinking about you,” she says, letting the robe fall open. “We’re still one, as far as the Force is concerned. The distance doesn’t matter.” 

Ben swallows and flicks his eyes to her, looking over her breasts. He’s still not thinking about what comes next--he simply likes looking at her when she’s got her clothes off. 

She lifts her hand, and the toggles on the neck of his tunic pop open. Ben startles, then begins to rise from his chair, thinking of sweeping the breakfast dishes to the floor and having her there if she’s of such an inclination. 

But Rey likes these teacups. She pushes him back down into his chair, using the Force. 

His eyes widen when she undoes the catches of his trousers from across the room and shows no sign of rising from her own seat to embrace him.

It’s not a thing they’ve done; he’s too intent on maximizing the amount of her skin he can press against his own when they make love. He likes the positions that have them cuddled up against each other. Him on top of her, pressing her hips into the mattress as he licks sweat from the back of her neck. Lying on their sides, one of her legs tossed over his hip, rotating in tiny circles. Splayed over his chest, his hands lifting her on his cock. 

He spreads his hands on the ends of the armrests, torn between desire and trepidation. She can stop pure energy in the air before her. It’s no trick at all to pull his shirt away from his body, push his pants down his thighs. 

She uses her own hands to spread her robe open around herself and sweep her hair back over her shoulders. 

“Rey,” Ben says, in a strangled voice. “Come over here.” He’s not fighting the invisible bonds that hold him down so much as he is testing them, assessing how hard she will try to keep him seated, across the table where he can’t touch her. 

“I don’t have to, Ben,” she tells him. 

She pulls off the soft synthsilk briefs and camisole that she wears and spreads her legs.

Ben makes another bid to stand, and she pushes him down. 

“Close your eyes,” she tells him. It’s the last thing he wants to do, but after a moment he complies. He trusts her.

“Be with me,” she says. His eyes flutter open, and then he belatedly realizes she means in the Force. 

There’s that dizzying sense of doubled awareness when his mind brushes against hers. He doesn’t barge in, anymore. It’s almost like a knock. A polite entreaty. He waits for her to pull him in, merge their consciousness. 

Rey looks down her own body. Her skin is tender and glowing after several weeks of soft living and care. She has curves and roundness now where she’d been ropy and rough. 

Ben’s eyes are closed as she traces the edge of a nipple with a fingertip. He’s not nearly so sensitive there, and he sucks in a breath at the sensation. 

She doesn’t object when he puts his hands on his hardening cock and strokes himself, but before he can get very far, she pulls his hands away and puts them on the arms of his chair. He whimpers in the back of his throat. He can feel not just his own arousal, but hers. 

“I can do that,” Rey says, reaching out with her mind to run a ghostly hand down his chest. She runs the sensation of touch between his legs, between her own, inside them. She’s not limited by what she could do with her own two hands; she can imagine a thousand, if she wants to, each one stroking and petting his skin and hers. She can spark individual nerves, stimulate places her hands can’t even reach. Between the two of them, they have power enough to destroy worlds. It’s the simplest thing to touch Ben to the brink, make him gasp and flex and pant where she holds him. She could do this from across the universe, not just their breakfast table. 

Rey’s eyes slip closed under their own weight as she enjoys the cresting wave of his pleasure, so bound up in her own. 

When he’s almost there, she goes to him, trailing her robe behind her. She arranges herself across the expanse of his bare thighs and runs her hands into his hair. 

His mouth is open a little, his lower lip trembling as his body responds to Rey wrapping herself around him across every sense, every dimension. 

“I can take care of the Galaxy and you too,” Rey leans forward to whisper in his ear. She releases his arms, and he throws them around her, pulling her closer. 

“Wherever I am in the universe, if you need me, I’ll be with you.” 

Ben ducks his head against her shoulder.

“If you feel alone, I can hold you.” 

His fingers dig into her ass. 

“And if anyone tries to hurt you, I’ll kill them.” 

At that last vow, his head tips back as he comes in a hot wet crest against their stomachs. They’re both covered in it, sticky and sweating, but Rey holds onto Ben until his body stops shaking and his breathing has slowed.

They turn their heads as one to a sound at the door to the chamber. 

Humans announce themselves. Droids do not. The protocol droid is heralded only by the hiss of the portal sliding into the wall, giving Rey barely enough time to jerk her robe shut around herself and Ben both. They’re both pink-cheeked and wide eyed, but reasonably covered under the blue fabric.

Except for Ben’s ass--it is probably hanging out under the back of the chair, facing the droid. How embarrassing for him, Rey thinks from her position astride the Supreme Leader. 

The protocol droid is matte black and golden-eyed; a fancy translation unit for their flagship. 

This droid’s programming is complete as well; it elects not to mention the compromising position it has found them in.

“Supreme Leader, you wished to be informed when the Resistance made contact?” it burbles, delighted to be able to deliver an important message.

“Yes,” Rey says, brushing Ben’s drying semen off her chest. “Please, continue.” 

Ben’s lip curls in displeasure. She supposes this is more awkward for him. 

“Yes, well, it is actually directed to the other Supreme Leader,” the droid says. “From a General Dameron.”

Oh, fantastic, Rey thinks. 

“He asks that Supreme Leader Kylo Ren meet him in the Takodana system as quickly as possible. He says he has an urgent message about your mother.” 

* * *

Takodana was the obvious choice for relocating three-million-odd (and they were _very_ odd, some of them) Sith cultists in need of a homeworld. Rey felt a little pang of the guilt when she realizes that the two of her and Ben were responsible for the chain of events that led to the depopulation of Takodana, but the fact remains that it is an unsettled garden world, conveniently set on the Biox Detour hyperspace route, on the frontier of the Core. 

Settling the Sith is a process that will take years. Life on Exegol has left most of them with weakened immune systems and an adversarial relationship with most other non-Sith carbon lifeforms. Rey attended one of the wilderness exposure sessions: thirty Sith cultists in exercise gear and smoked lenses to protect their fragile eyes from the glow of the Takodana sun, all sneezing and looking up at the trees with suspicion and mistrust. 

But there are little colonies dotted across the landscape now, former shock troopers reading manuals on forestry and aquaculture and how to have hobbies. 

The star destroyers hang in the sky above the planet, staffed with skeleton crews. Rey looks forward to cannibalizing the lot of them, turning them into homes and speeders and transport ships. 

It is here that the _Derriphan_ blinks out of hyperspace, discovering a ragtag fleet of antique light cruisers, fighters, and even merchant vessels arrayed against the nearly abandoned Sith Eternal fleet. 

Rey goes with Ben, of course. Poe thinks he’s smart almost as much as he thinks he’s funny, and neither is really true when it comes to making spur of the moment decisions. And Ben’s still likely to order the entire Resistance dispatched the second they fire. 

Ben’s pupils constrict when he spots the _Millenium Falcon_ at the front of the ersatz Resistance fleet. His expression is smooth and neutral, but Rey can feel agitation rolling off him in waves. 

“Get him on the comms,” Ben growls. 

The bridge has been repaired from the battle with Pryde, the officer corps refreshed. Rey had additional lighting placed around the floor and more ergonomic chairs installed. It’s not a cheerful space, by any means, but no longer looks like it was designed by cultists, for cultists. 

She and Ben stand within arms-reach of each other, at the center, when they get the Resistance on vidcom. 

Poe sits at the pilot’s seat, Finn at his side. Behind them, Rose Tico stands with arms folded anxiously next to Commander D’Acy. In the middle, on the floor, is General Armitage Hux, gagged and bound and making muffled noises of outrage. Despite being so trussed, he looks rather pleased with himself, to Rey's assessing gaze. 

Finn’s eyes widen a little to see Rey at the helm of a star destroyer, dressed in a long, blue gown. Rey’s done fighting people with laser swords. She no longer dresses for combat, only her own comfort.

“Where’s my mother?” Ben says in a snarl, before Poe can open his mouth. 

Poe blinks in surprise to see Ben freely acknowledge the familial connection, but recovers swiftly. 

“I came here to tell you that Princess Leia has resigned her commission and retired,” Poe tells Ben. “As the ranking officer of the Resistance, I inform you that you can take your demands and shove them.” 

Resigned? Why would Leia resign? 

Ben’s eyes narrow as he and Rey search for his mother in the Force. She must be physically well or they would both know otherwise, but they’ve felt nothing in the Force to tell them of one of the most powerful Force-users in the Galaxy changing the course of her life. 

“Poe, there weren’t any demands,” Rey says, resisting the urge to put her palm over her forehead when she speaks to him. “I offered you an unconditional armistice. What are you _doing_ here?” 

Finn looks uneasy. He’s shifting in his chair, looking between Poe and Rey. 

“An unconditional ceasefire _is_ a demand!” Poe shoots back. “It means you want us to accept the Emperor’s rule, Sith expansion, give up the fight-”

Ben lifts his hand to signal the weapons officer to combat readiness, and Rey swats it down. 

“Dameron, you dumb nerf-herder, I killed the Emperor,” she tells him. 

Finn’s eyes widen. He glances back at Rose, whose mouth has dropped open. This is clearly news to them. 

Poe looks unconvinced. “Why should we believe you? You traitor, you’re probably lying. You switched sides in the middle of the war. The Dark Side can corrupt anything. Just look at the two of you.” 

Rey looks at Ben. He doesn’t look very corrupt; he’s had a shower and a change of clothes, and she’s even coaxed him into a tunic that, under the right light conditions, might be called grey He’s not even armed. 

“Didn’t Leia tell you that the Emperor is gone?” Rey asks, suddenly wondering. “I’m sure she felt it in the Force.”

Poe grits his jaw. His lip curls. 

“She left,” Rose says from behind him. “She and Chewie and half the senior officers. They got your note and left the next day. They went to-”

“-I can handle this, thanks,” Poe snaps without looking at her. FInn squirms again, looking back at Rose for reassurance.

Rey sighs. “So what do you want, Poe? I can tell you where Exegol used to be. You can go take a look with your own two eyes. I’m sure you can tell we’ve stopped hunting the Resistance, since you’re still alive yourself.” 

Poe’s expression hardens. “Surrender,” he says. “Surrender the Final Order. We know you haven’t set up air defense systems down there yet, and your fleet is sitting dead in the water.” 

Rey has to smack Ben’s hand even harder this time. 

_He’s about to order an attack,_ he tells her through the bond.

 _I like three fifths of the people on that ship_ , Rey responds. 

_I really hate that ship._

_I know._

“Poe, those are civilian installations on Takodana,” Rey tells him. “And those ships aren’t crewed because they’re being decommissioned. Why would you attack them?”

Before Poe can respond, a radar officer yells that another fleet has dropped out of hyperspace. She sends her screen up to the main display, and Rey sees another group of antique vessels array themselves between the Sith Eternal fleet and Takodana’s atmosphere, weapons systems at the ready.

“Poe, why did you signal-” Finn yelps.

Rey sees the first laser torpedo ricochet off the passive shields of a star destroyer. Then half a dozen more as the weapons systems of the motley Rebel fleet come online. There aren’t enough crew on those ships to muster an active defense. 

Ben signals the bridge officers to begin powering up the weapons system on the Derriphan, and Rey’s heart sinks. She can’t countermand that order if the defenseless former soliders on the ground are at risk. 

“This is all just a distraction,” Poe snarls, flipping on the shields on the Millenium Falcon. “Any second now, that asshole is going to open fire. This is our chance. This is-”

He doesn’t finish that thought, his teeth clacking together audibly as thousands of volts of electricity convulse through his neck. He jolts from the pilot seat and slumps away, eyes white and staring.

Commander Tico never did pick up a conventional sidearm, preferring her reliable electro-shock prod. 

“Sorry about that,” she mutters to Poe before gingerly pushing him, still convulsing, into Hux' lap.

She brushes her hair from her face, and steps daintily over Poe to take the pilot’s seat. Finn is staring at her in a combination of surprise, fear, and what looks to Rey like admiration, and Commander D’Acy has a hand pressed to her chest in breathless awe. 

“This is acting General Rose Tico,” Rose says over the comms, her voice shaky but clear. “I have relieved Poe Dameron of command. I’m ordering a ceasefire. Resistance intelligence has failed.” She pauses and mutters under her breath, “we’re going to need a lot more intelligence around here.” 

Ben’s shoulders relax, and each of the bridge officers lets out relieved breaths as the boards show the two Resistance fleets ceasing to fire. D’Acy wipes sweat off her forehead. 

Rose looks back up at the vid display. “Rey, Leia’s on Ahch-To.” 

Rey’s heart throbs--no, it’s Ben’s. 

“Like Luke?” Rey asks. If Leia decides to take other students, reestablish the Jedi order, there’s nothing they can do, or are willing to do--but then Rey fears the countervailing rise of darkness to meet that light. 

Finn has knelt to put a jacket under Poe’s head and check his vital signs, but he pops back up on the screen to shake his head. He’s still a little shaky, but he’s got that relieved expression people get when they figure out they aren’t going to die. “I don’t think so. She said she wanted to see if you two could find a different way. She said she’d be in touch if you did,” Finn tells them. 

Rey puts her hand on Ben’s forearm. She wishes she could take it, under the circumstances, but this is a military exercise. Ben’s muscles tense, and then he grabs her hand anyway. 

Finn makes a face, but Rose leans forward, her face nearly conspiratorial. “Actually, what she said was, may the Force be with you, and she’ll come around if there are grandchildren.” 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got so many thoughtful and insightful comments on this. I am truly overwhelmed. I also don't think I'll ever write canonverse again- the lack of care shown by everyone involved in TRoS is so destructive to the franchise, and every time I looked up some detail on Wookiepedia, I thought "why am I doing this, when JJ couldn't be arsed to even call the story group after they paid him enough money to buy my entire hometown outright?"
> 
> One thing I struggled with in this chapter is Leia's desire for grandkids and Rey's for a family, both of which are canon and yet totally unresolved within TRoS. I personally can't write pregnancy (and I didn't tag for it from the start, which I would want to do if I ever ended a fic that way), but obviously these kids are cooking with gas and you are free to HC that Rey's knocked up by chapter 6.

Few of the locals are sober enough, so early in the morning, to watch the Final Order arrive on Tatooine. The reins of empire ever lay but lightly on this planet: too remote, too resource-poor, too underpopulated to be of interest to any but its destitute residents and those criminal elements of the galaxy looking to avoid the notice of larger powers.

Only the local Stormtrooper garrison and a trio of Tusken Raiders--invited at the insistence of Supreme Leader Rey, and present for the novelty of having been invited---are there to see the two Supreme Leaders descend from the command shuttle. 

Which is too bad, as they make a pretty picture. The first Supreme Leader is clad, as always, in unrelieved black. In deference to the desert heat, he wears long and flowing robes, and goes cowled and gloved. (“You bruise like a peach, and you’ll fry yourself as red as Nightbloomer petals if you don’t cover up,” were the words of the second Supreme Leader, as they dressed that morning.)

The second Supreme Leader herself is clad in a lovely gown of layers of transparent green and blue gauze, embroidered with vines and flowers and growing things, and more than half of the Stormtroopers present fall terribly in love with her on sight. 

They walk down the gangway as a pair, the hand of one resting lightly on the burly, muscular arm of the other, and they pause at the first landing to survey the assembled troops and the huddled form of Mos Eisley beyond them.

“What a  _ shithole _ ,” says Rey, using the Teedo word for a kitchen midden where Happabore offal is fermented. 

“We can leave and solve this problem via orbital canons as well,” Ben murmurs, raising a hand to acknowledge the saluting Stormtroopers. 

Rey clucks her tongue at him as they resume their descent into the main thoroughfare of the town, such as it is. “It’s not about one recalictrant despot. It’s about setting an example.” 

The local garrison commander ushers them into a waiting speeder for transport to the palace of Rotta Hutt. 

“I understand setting an example,” Ben says, already shaking sand out of his hood with a faintly outraged expression, “I just think you could set a bigger one by setting this entire benighted sector aflame.” 

“The example,” Rey says, “is of a planet actually doing what we want. We have made plenty of examples of things set on fire.” 

Ben sees the wisdom in this, though she can tell he is mentally calculating the trigonometry of lofting a boulder into the domed rooftops of the slaver’s palace as they approach. 

The Hutt Clan have lost much power since the death of Jabba Desilijic Tiure. The spice trade had been, prior to the destruction of Kijimi, mostly diverted to other hands. Tatooine exports only slaves and imports only criminals. Nonetheless, criminality, like space, abhors a vacuum, and the Supreme Leaders had recently received reports that Rotta has been aggressively muscling into the trading of slaves for spice in the Outer Rim. 

Jabba’s son, Rotta Hutt, now inhabits his father’s palace, clinging to the memories of the days when the Hutt clan controlled vast swaths of galactic trade. Their reach is more limited now, but still extends well beyond the dusty thin atmosphere of Tatooine to a constellation of other planets in the Outer Rim. 

Ben and Rey leave their entourage at the well-guarded gates to the Hutt compound and descend through thick ferrocrete tunnels to the cool dark of Rotta’s throne room.

The creature himself reclines on a throne of lavishly woven pillows, puffing on spice whilst being entertained by a coterie of wretched-looking dancers and musicians, each cobbled or collared in some fashion. 

Rey swallows hard, seeking the peace of the Force. Or, failing that, the purpose of it. She did not come armed. Nobody had to die today. 

Ben had some decided preferences on that front, and Rey is rapidly coming around to them, but it is still not necessary that anyone die for her purpose to be achieved. 

“What brings the all-mighty First Order to my doorstep?” Rotta asks in Huttese, chuckling viciously. 

“I believe you know,” Ben says curtly, raising a hand. “In fact, I know you do, as it’s up at the forefront of your mind.” 

Several members of Rotta’s court shrink back in superstitious terror of Force witchery, but Rotta only laughs louder.

“I am an open page, Supreme Leader,” he howls. “But you, do they even know who  _ you _ are, young Solo?” 

Ben drops his hand and looks at him with scorn, and greater restraint than Rey might have expected. 

“And who do you think I am?” he asks softly. 

Rotta sneers, “Your father decorated this throne room. Your mother danced for the pleasure of our guests. Your uncle, we tossed into the garbage.” 

Rey thinks that possibly Rotta’s information is a little out of date, if he thinks that Ben is going to argue that Luke deserved better, but Ben shrugs it off.

“And my grandfather carried you home as you cried and leaked poodoo, from what I understand. I do not think the Hutts have profited from their connection to my family, but it is up to you whether you alter that trend, Rotta.”

Rotta relaxes into his nest of cushions, taking a drag on a spice burner. 

“So direct, you Skywalkers always are,” he complains. “Well, if you are so determined to get down to business, shall you negotiate with the Hutt clan?”

“No,” says Rey, who has watched long enough. “The Final Order’s dictates are few and simple, Rotta. Even mighty worlds like Coruscant and Corellia have designated governors. Why does Tatooine refuse these instructions? We do not require that you surrender your wealth and power, merely acknowledge them.”

“Because I am Rotta Hutt, not your governor,” he sneers. “If I accept your title and your power, you will think that I owe you obedience.”

“I believe you are mistaken, noble Rotta,” Rey answers. “It is not necessary that you personally serve. The Final Order merely requests that you appoint a representative who will report on the progress of fulfilling Galactic goals for peace, prosperity, and the elimination such universally despised ills as the slave trade.”

Rotta laughs louder and deeper. “Someone has misinformed you, Supreme Leader! We do not have the slave trade here on Tatooine.” He gestures broadly at the cringing group of chained entertainers at the other end of the room. “All work for minimum wage here.” 

“And what is the minimum wage, on Tatooine?” Rey asks. 

“Food and shelter, of course,” Rotta replies. “This is not some fat, rich water world.” 

Ben is getting impatient, slapping the hilt of his lightsaber against his thigh. “Playtime is coming to a rapid end, Rotta. Will you appoint a governor, or do we have a problem?”

Rotta licks his corpulent lips, and thinks on that. 

There are at least fifteen sharpshooters hidden in the walls; Rey can feel their minds. Some more are there, cloaked in cortosis armor and armed with sonic grenades; Rey can hear their breathing. Rotta is not certain that he can kill Rey and Ben both before they strike him down, although he feels certain that his forces are sufficient to repel the Stormtroopers in the city against any kind of retaliatory strike. 

“Dekkirt, come here,” he grunts, gesturing at a green-skinned Twi’lek, crouched and shivering behind a crowd of other dancers. At the insistent crooking of his meaty finger, the girl finally rises and nearly crawls toward his throne.

When she reaches Rotta, he puts a heavy hand on one of her lekku, digging his fingers in.

“Dekkirt is Tatooine’s representative,” he says with a smile.

Ben’s hand strays again to his lightsaber hilt, and Rey mentally bats it away. She steps away from him, approaching the throne. 

She kneels in front of the Twi’lek girl.

“Dekkirt,” she says. “Do you accept this appointment?”

The girl twitches away from her, glancing fearfully up at the hutt for approval. She nods in the faintest movement. 

“Will you, as the Final Order’s representative on Tatooine, do your utmost to preserve the peace, the purpose, the free will of all people on this planet?” Rey asks, setting a gentle hand on the girl’s knee. 

Dekkirt blinks her dark eyes at Rey, studying her for the first time. She is very young, Rey can see--older than the time when Unkar set her free to win her own portions or starve, but younger than Rey was when she wrestled a BB-8 unit away from Teedo. 

Dekkirt and she look into each other for a moment, Rey fanning the fragile bond in the Force that exists between all living creatures, until she thinks they understand each other a little.

“Yes,” Dekkirt whispers. “I will.” 

Rey straightens and nods. “Rotta, our business is concluded. We will deal with Governor Dekkirt as to matters relating to Tatooine, henceforth.” 

Rotta howls again with laughter, slapping his thick midsection. “What a farce,” he says. “This is the dance your woman performs for you, little Skywalker?” he asks Ben. “I liked your mother’s performance better.” 

Ben tilts his head, unperturbed. “You’ll see,” he notes.

Rey extends her hand to Dekkirt and helps her up. The girl squeezes it tightly as she comes to stand between Rey and Ben.

“Governor, what is the greatest threat to the First Order’s goals here on Tatooine?” Rey asks, conversationally. 

Dekkirt does not hesitate in pointing out the hutt lounging on his throne. 

Before Rotta can laugh again, Rey has frozen every living being in the room, save for the three standing in its center. She and Ben are a dyad in the Force, inconceivably more powerful than one half-trained Jedi. 

She slowly lifts Rotta from the cushions by way of her grip on his neck. Leia taught her how to do this, at least. Rotta remembered the wrong part of the story; he remembered only how Leia danced in chains, and not how she wrapped them around his father’s neck and choked the life from him. 

Remembered that Luke would not strike Jabba down with his lightsaber, and not how his entire court fell into the sarlacc’s jaws anyway.

Well, Rey considers death to be death, and Ben’s blade more merciful than the eternal, disembodied torment digestion by a sarlacc might provide. 

“What are the offenses of Rotta Hutt?” Rey asks Dekkirt.

Rotta gurgles and chokes, his long tail thrashing on the ground and overturning the furniture. 

“He...he keeps slaves,” Dekkirt says. “Like me. He killed my parents. He smuggles into First Order worlds. Neutral ones, too. He kidnaps people.” 

“Which people?” Ben asks her to specify. 

“He put a bounty out on a Wookie and an old Socorran smuggler here in town. He was going to trade them to you for shipping rights in this sector.” 

Ben runs a hand over the bridge of his nose, sighing. It's too much to hope its a different Wookie and Socorran--ones who didn't change his diapers. 

“What should we do with Rotta, then?” Rey asks Dekkirt, trying to keep them on track. 

Dekkirt’s eyes narrow. 

“Kill him,” she says.

* * *

An hour later, Ben is panting into the back of her neck as Rey digs her fingernails into the crumbling plaster of a wall supporting a crumbling cantina. Ben slowly pulls out and lets their robes fall from where he’d hitched them up around their waists. Rey feels that now-familiar and indolent surge of mingled discomfort and satisfaction begin to roll through her. She shakes her head, straightens her dress. They have more to accomplish before they leave Tatooine. 

“Feel better?” Rey asks, rolling over to put her back to the wall and face Ben. She reaches up to wipe a bit of blood off his cheek. 

She knows how Ben will respond: he is fine. Rotta Hutt’s unfortunate resistance to Rey’s generous offer of participation in parliamentary monarchy required their personal intervention. That intervention is now concluded, and Governor Dekkirt seems far more amenable to a working relationship between Tatooine and the Final Order. Rey did not get any blood on her pretty dress. 

Of course, Rey might point out that Ben is entitled to have some  _ feelings  _ about single-handedly fighting off over a dozen well-armed guards as they shot at him and his intended, much less Rotta’s pre-mortem taunts, and those feelings might be the reason he seemed so utterly determined to engage in some life-affirming activity against this unromantic bit of wall, but she knows better. 

Ben won’t admit that he was suffering from any emotion so banal as fear, or even suffering from anything less than a sudden desire to molest her person. 

“I’m fine,” Ben says, buckling his belt.

Rey knows better. 

She cups his face. “It won’t always be like this. We had to make an example, and it had to be here.”

“We could have made an example from orbit.” 

Rey shakes her head again. “Nobody had to die, this way.” 

Ben looks pointedly at the blood on his robe; it’s not his, but narrowing it down past that point is impossible, given the number of people who argued for preserving existing forms of government in Hutt space, and did so with blasters. 

“A lot of people died.” 

“Yes, my love, but what they’ll remember is that no one  _ had _ to die, you see?” Rey says, brushing some ash off his shoulder. “The next time we have to tell some clay pot despot that he needs to stop selling slaves, he’ll remember that he lives if he negotiates.” 

Ben cocks his head. “Say that again.” 

“If people think we’ll let them live after they surrender, they won’t fight to the death?”

“No,” Ben says, pulling her back to him. “The part where you love me.” 

Rey frowns. “You know,” she points out. 

“Yes, but it’s still nice to hear it.” 

* * *

Effecting regime change was only her morning agenda in Tatooine. There are enough people now who know that the Supreme Leader was born Ben Solo, son of Leia Organa, daughter of Anakin Skywalker. 

The weight of the past can be a cornerstone...or an anchor. 

“This is where Luke grew up?” Rey remarks, cautiously, as they disembark the speeder at the ruins of the Lars moisture farm. 

It’s a ruin now, little more than stones and rubble. Still, someone has kept a single grave clear, amid the mess of trash and charred bones. 

“Explains why he was such a weirdo,” Ben says, looking around scornfully. He looks down at the grave and sighs. “It feels like grave robbing.” 

“It’s not grave robbing, it’s grave moving. Would you want to spend eternity here?” Rey demands. 

“Nobody knows if Shmi Skywalker was Force-sensitive,” Ben points out. “If she wasn’t, there’s no eternity to worry about.” 

Rey rolls her eyes. “Nobody ever asked. The Jedi were too busy robbing cradles to care if someone’s mother fulfilled her potential.” 

Ben looks around and sighs, then begins to roll up his sleeves. “Do you have a shovel?” he asks. 

Rey gives him an ‘are you kidding’ look and taps the side of her head. “If there were ever a time to use the Force, Ben, this would be it,” she points out. 

His wide mouth pulls briefly to the side. 

“I feel like...I should do this with my own hands,” he said. “In my family, nobody ended up raising their own children. Nobody stayed together. Nobody ever came out and said what they meant. If we’re making a point about this, we might as well start as we mean to go on.”

“Put on some sun cream, then,” Rey says, squinting at the brilliant binary suns.

It takes Ben all afternoon to dig up the coffin of Shmi Skywalker and load it into the back of a speeder. 

He has no sooner brushed the sand from his palms and put his shirt back on than a second speeder appears on the horizon.

They did not anticipate an interruption, so Ben expresses no hesitation in calling his lightsaber to him. 

He does not ignite it when their eyes discern the two figures in the speeder: one tall and furred, the other shorter, broader, and balding, but he does slap it against his thigh in distress. 

“Did you tell the Hutt clan to release them? You could have waited until we were off-planet,” Ben complains to Rey as Lando and Chewbacca pull up next to the excavated grave.

“If you had to do this, might as well be without witnesses,” Rey says, perching on the side of their own speeder and crossing her legs at the ankles to watch. 

Lando painfully slides out over the edge of his vehicle and approaches, trailed by Chewie. Ben gnaws on the inside of his cheek.

“You’re a hard kind of a person to track down, kid, for all you’re on every holovid,” he says, warily sizing Ben up. 

They stare at each other for a few moments like two Loth cats in an unfamiliar territory, assessing the scars and years left on their faces. Ben hesitantly extends his hand, which Lando ignores. The shorter man brushes past the proffered hand in favor of wrapping Ben in a bear hug. 

“Kriff, you got big. Why didn’t you write?”

Ben freezes, as there are a lot of answers to that question he prefers not to think about. 

Lando gives him a heavy-lidded grin--he knows  _ why. _

“Well,” Ben says, in slow and halting tones, “It’s hard to send a holomessage addressed to ‘a third-rate whorehouse somewhere in the Outer Rim, probably.’” 

Lando guffaws, and so does Chewie. 

“Sorry about borrowing the Falcon,” Rey tells Chewie. He roars a flippant response. 

They retreat into the ruined cavern of the Lars family living quarters to get out of the sun, take seats on bits of dusty machinery.

Ben is trying to project calm, but he keeps darting glances at Lando and Chewie, then clenching his hands to keep them off the hilt of his lightsaber.

Rey rescues him, smiling as though she is a gracious Corellian hostess presiding over a society dinner. 

“So, I assume Leia sent you?” she asks Lando. 

Lando rubs the back of his neck, looking slightly embarrassed. 

“Well, she’s been getting some conflicting reports. She mentioned I might want to check in on you,” he mumbles. 

“On me? Or on Ben?”

“Seems like a package deal, these days?” Lando parries, and Rey is unamused.

“Did she ask you recently, or fifteen years ago, and you got lost along the way?” Ben says, frowning. 

Chewie whirrs dismissively, but Lando waves him off. 

“No, I get it,” Lando says. “You’ve had some tough breaks. You got a raw deal. I’m just here to say, you’ve still got options. You don’t have to start this cult of personality thing on Naboo, and you can leave grandma in the ground.”

Ben stares at him. “What do you mean, cult? I’m the Supreme Leader.”

Lando winces. “The whole Skywalker mystique. Don’t you think it’s time to get over that? All the Force mumbo-jumbo? Everywhere I’ve been for the past month, they talk about the two of you like you’re not human.”

“What exactly are you worried about?” Rey asks. “I don’t see how Leia or anyone else can argue with what we’ve done. The Emperor is gone, the Sith are being integrated into galactic society, we’re finally working on the slave trade…” 

Chewie thinks they’re missing the point. 

“He’s right,” Lando says. “It’s just not healthy for any one--or two people--to have as much power as you two have. Just look at what the last few generations have proved.”

“I did look,” Ben says. “My mother would never see, and neither did the Jedi. They spent all their power fighting the Sith, instead of fighting for something they wanted. My grandfather was the most powerful Jedi ever, and they bought and sold him like a slave. My uncle defeated the Emperor, and he walked away from the galaxy to chase a dead religion rather than try to rebuild the Republic. We won’t make their same mistakes.” 

“The Skywalkers didn’t misuse their power. They didn’t use it at all,” Rey agrees, nodding.

Lando swishes his cape out of the way as he readjusts his perch. 

“That doesn’t explain what you’re doing here,” he says. “Digging up your great-grandmother, ruining Rotta Hutt’s day.”

“Because the Skywalkers were born on Tatooine, but they didn’t stay there,” Ben says. “They went to a green planet. Slaves to Supreme Leader in four generations. That’s the story we’re telling.” 

Chewie chuffs thoughtfully. 

Lando tugs on his mustaches as he ponders that. “I still think you should give up the ultimate power gig. Come with me and Chewie. We have a fast ship and nowhere in particular we have to be.”

Ben’s smile politely tells him he’s about ten years too late with that offer, and Lando’s sad wince confirms the same impression. 

Rey elbows Ben. “We really do need to be going, though, places to go, slave rebellions to fan, trade routes to secure,” she says. “But you could give them an invitation?” 

Ben brightens a bit at that, and goes to their speeder to retrieve his knapsack.

He’s been doing the calligraphy himself after Rey suggested that he take up a hobby. Rey made the paper, he ground the ink and hand lettered the text. Their Sith Eternal secretary was charmed. 

“I assume you can get my mother’s invitation to her. These two are for you and Chewie, plus one if it matters. Lake Country in Naboo, two fortnights from now,” Ben says. 

Lando takes the envelopes with a puzzled expression. “Invitations to-

“Our investiture ceremony,” Rey says, at the same time that Ben says, “our wedding.” 

She grimaces at Ben, and Lando looks back and forth between them.

“Well,” Lando says. “I’m sure your mother wouldn’t miss either of those events for the world.”

* * *

  
It is springtime in southern Naboo, the evening of their investiture as Emperor and Empress. Most of the Sith are in atmospheric suits for the occasion, given the number of flowers and grasses that bloom around the circular field set aside for the ceremony. Rey can hear a few muffled sneezes, regardless. They are on the opposite shore from Varykino, where they’ve spent the past few days preparing for this evening, and the lanterns twinkle over the darkening shadow of the lake. 

They have timed the ceremony to begin at sunset. Ben turns out to have a fine mind for symbolism and ceremony, as a politician’s son, and all of the colors of the event suggest transition, balance, and harmony.

There will be no coronation, because what higher authority would Rey and Ben recognize to grant them a crown? They crowned each other. 

Rey has a diadem spray of kyber crystals perched in her twisted updo, matching the simple circlet resting in Ben’s glossy curls. 

And she finally has her green dress. Sleeveless, trailing behind her in soft green folds that catch on the grass as she ascends the altar between the assembled masses of Sith and galactic dignitaries. Ben made a halfhearted suggestion that she wear white lace, folding very quickly when she told him that if he wanted white lace at the ceremony, he was welcome to wear it himself. 

She’s proud of him, anyway, for not wearing black. His robes are midnight blue. In a direct light. 

She doesn’t recognize most of the people there. Representatives of most trade nations, powerful species, wealthy worlds. Also the captains of the Sith Eternal fleet and remaining First Order officers. A few members of the Resistance and the former New Republic.

One row, really, of people Rey cared about. Finn and Rose. Chewie and Lando. (Poe is still “thinking about leadership,” Rose told Rey, under the watchful eyes of Commander D’Acy and Lieutenant Connix). 

And Leia, wearing white robes on the front row, beaming at them both. (Rey’s not sure whether anyone has told her this is not a wedding, and she doesn’t know which answer she would find more disturbing). 

What most people in the crowd cannot see is the faintly glowing coterie of Force ghosts standing on the shore of the lake. Human and humanoid, crisp and indistinct. Nearly two dozen of them, observing as the last Skywalker and the last Palpatine join their hands and declare the end of the Sith and the Jedi and the beginning of a new era of galactic peace. 

It’s the hopeful ending they wanted. 

* * *

  
  
They return to their flagship after--there is too much urgent business in the Galaxy to enjoy a lengthy stay among the waterfalls of Naboo. Perhaps someday, there will be time and peace enough to return and lay another wreath on the monument to the countless victims of the wars between the Jedi and Sith where the Skywalkers are buried. 

Instead, Ben watches with hooded eyes as Rey ascends to the seat at the apex of the throne room. It’s larger, now, and cushioned. (“I’d like to get wider across the hips,” Rey told the architect. “Build it to last.”) 

When she is seated, he kneels at her feet instead of sitting at her side.

“You’re my empress,” he says, sliding his hands up her ankles and lifting her skirts. 

“Yes,” Rey agrees. 

His hands are large enough to circle her calves entirely as he runs them up her legs. 

Rey uses the Force to push an inquisitive servitor droid out of the room and shut the doors behind them. 

Ben grips her thighs and pulls her hips to the edge of the seat, arranging himself between her knees.

Rey mentally checks the deadbolts on the door. 

“My mother thinks she just saw a wedding,” Ben adds, pressing a chaste kiss to the inside of her knee. 

“Well, you did say some very complimentary things about me,” Rey agrees, a touch breathlessly. 

Ben rubs his nose against her inner thighs, drags his lower lip against outer labia...but doesn’t quite get there. 

He hooks her knees over his broad shoulders, and Rey settles her back against the cushions now padding the throne. 

And then he stops, looking up at her with a certain crafty gleam in his eyes.

“Admit it,” he says.

“Admit what?” Rey asks innocently, twisting to bring her core closer to the warm heat of his mouth.

“You know what,” Ben says, eyes narrowing. He presses the bridge of his nose into her pubic hair, mere centimeters from where she wants him.  She makes an impatient noise in the back of her throat, but Ben is resolute. He turns his head and grows fascinated with a spot at the bend of her hip, showing every sign of patterning her thighs with love bites until she gives in.

He shouldn’t get everything he wants. He’s a monster. A killer. A darksider. An unrepentant megalomaniac.

“Oh fine,” Rey says, grabbing the top of his head and yanking it back to where it should be. “We’re married.” 

[Wipe transition, roll credits.]  
  



End file.
